> I'm looking for suggestions for a hardware SCSI RAID controller > similar in features to an Adaptec 2010S. One that is known to work > well with Redhat Enterprise Linux 5 and 4 without requiring external > drivers or custom kernels and is actively being sold. > > http://www.adaptec.com/en-US/products/_eol/scsi_prem/ultra160_320/ASR-2010S > > Comments from anyone with personal experience with a similar RAID > controller under both OS's who are happy with device and driver > performance are welcome.
You don't choose ZCR-cards, they choose you. Meaning you cannot mix & match mobos and ZCR-cards at will. Any particular mobo has a set of compatible ZCR-cards (generally speaking from the same manufacturer as the onboard SCSI-chipset). Megaraid's have a pretty good track record here. I don't have any of their ZCR-models though. One warning though, their pre-SAS cards suck horribly with write if you do not enable WB-cache on the controller. Which is not a good idea without a BBU. Yes it applies to other RAID-modes than 5 too. I don't know if their SAS-gear still exhibits this, haven't found sufficient interest to test it yet. IMO choosing a RAID-card is very dependant on what you do with it. For very high speed single/few thread sequental work, in my experience Areca kicks butt like no other. Choosing xfs over ext3 improves the experience still. Their newest cards are SAS-controllers, so SATA-only days are gone. For good random i/o, my personal choice is Megaraid. The various options available on them do play a significant role in optimizing performance. Do test different configurations on production/simulated load whereever possible. Oh, one more thing. AFAIK no Megaraid still supports (properly) dual-pathed SAS-backplanes. By properly I mean it'll see the disks on both channelbundles, redundancy works. But it cannot detect disk changes without a reboot. -- Jussi _______________________________________________ rhelv5-list mailing list [email protected] https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/rhelv5-list
