> From [EMAIL PROTECTED] Wed Apr 18 05:56:24 2001 > > 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. Yup. But the same could be said of "consumer level" SCSI RAID 5 cards. Generating the parity bits on writes certainly takes a lot of grunt. > > 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 :) That applies for ANY bit of hardware, not just the RAID card. Any sane person would keep a spare around for production work. That said, I've not had one of these (of the 20 or so I have) fail in a year's time. Cheers, C -- Chris Mauritz [EMAIL PROTECTED] - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
