On Sun, Jan 03, 2010 at 03:11:25PM -0800, Ryan Allen wrote: > Hi SSL, > > I just purchased 4 new 1TB SATA drives, and attempted to upgrade my > RAID 5 system to 3 TB. however my Dell CERC 6 channel SATA RAID card > will only let me build a RAID volume up to 2 TB. > > I couldn't find any firmware upgrades on this horribly supported > el-cheepo raid card. At least its been a solid work horse, with > little problems aside from a horrible UI utility called afacli. > > I am looking for a hardware RAID card, PCI-X (100MHz), that has an > fairly easy to use UI that is well supported in Linux. It should > also take advantage of ALL my drive space for an expected volume of a > little under 3TB. > > Any suggestions? I would like to not spend $550 on an fancy 3ware > card either. Anything in the $100 range?
You may not have much money to spend on this, but surely this data is important to you? With a multi-terabyte array, the chance of silent data corruption leading to later rebuild failure exceeds 50% with RAID4/5. And yes, I have had enough personal experience for it to be statistically valid. I have not had much better luck with RAID6 either. No more: http://baarf.com/ You'll have much better luck with RAID1 or RAID10. You could do it with the equipment you have if you're willing to live with 2TB of space. You're almost guaranteed to get "fake RAID" in a $100 4-port controller. You're certainly not going to get a battery backup unit for that, which is *essential* for decent performance with RAID5. Oh, and you'll probably want to doublecheck that it really is a RAID card limitation and not just a partitioning problem - the classic MBR partition format only supports 2TB drives. You have to use something more sane (such as GPT) to partition a larger drive. -- Robert Woodcock - [email protected] "Down, not Across" -- alt.sysadmin.recovery
