Hi there,
On Tue, 17 Apr 2001, ritz wrote:
> > we're going to add another server in the next couple of months. I've always
> > used software RAID & SCSI in the past, but the prices of the ATA RAID
> > controllers+drives would save me money. I was looking at the Promise
> > supertrack100 for RAID 5. I didn't see it (or any ATA raid stuff) in Red
> > Hat's compatibility list. However, I thought this was something I read would
> > be added in the 2.4.x kernels, and therefore will be supported in 7.1.
> > Anyone have any experience or recommendations on this subject? BTW, I'm more
> > concerned w/ reliability than speed. TIA.
>
> The supertrack is ungodly slow. There was a review of it at
> storagereview.com not too long ago. You may want to consider
> the 3Ware cards instead. They are supported by the 2.4 kernels
> natively and by earlier kernels with the included driver disks
> they ship. Also, they now support RAID 5. You simply update
> the firmware with the current rev when you get the board. Oh
> yeah, the 8-port model is also a bit cheaper than the 6-port
> supertrack.
I haven't seen any UDMA RAID cards which provide decent RAID-5
performance. Bearing in mind that recent UDMA drives can sustain 30 MB/s
read or write, the average RAID-5 card (IIRC) can handle maybe 5-10 MB/s
when it should be doing 60-100 MB/s. This is because the on-board
processors used on UDMA RAID cards are completely inadequate for RAID-5.
> I've been using the 4-port and 8-port cards with RH6.2/7.0 and
> even Windows2000 with great success. Like you, I'd been using
> software RAID for years, but got tired of things breaking at
> each new kernel release and having to hunt down the various
> patches. 8-( The hardware RAID cards make it pretty painless.
What about if the card dies and nobody can ship you a replacement for two
weeks? With software RAID you can put the hard disks in a completely
different machine and get it running straight off :)
Regards,
Corin
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