I purposely buy PCI-Express HBAs (host-bus adapters) instead of full blown raid cards for use with software raid systems. They're a lot cheaper than reliable hardware raid cards ($100s vs $1000s) and are a lot more reliable than any cheap fake-raid (raid-in-driver) card. I've even "downgraded" the firmware on some full blown raid cards to make them basic HBAs in order to make sure none of their proprietary RAID stack would get in the way of a clean software raid setup. I normally buy 8-port SATA HBAs and am currently running several 20TB arrays using Linux mdraid, 8-port LSI HBAs, 4TB drives, and RAID6.
So yes, people can and do buy SATA expansion cards (HBAs) for use with software raid. On Sat, Feb 15, 2014 at 10:22 PM, Stan Fotinos <[email protected]>wrote: > If you need to connect lots of drives, software raid can use the maximum > number of drives ports that your motherboard has ie 6 drives. You could buy > a sata expansion card to add more ports I would guess, never tried this... > Has anyone done this bofore? > > With one hardware raid card could plugin 24 drives :-) > > Stan > > > On 15/02/14 9:26 AM, Cowboy wrote: > >> On Friday 14 February 2014 05:32:08 pm Jim Stewart wrote: >> >>> 3) Linux RAID also seem less picky about choice of hard drives as >>> you can mix and match (although typically not the greatest idea for >>> performance reasons), and all is fine. >>> >> That's because Linux software RAID is partition based, not device based. >> You could build a RAID array on a single disk, though there would be >> no advantage, and several disadvantages to doing so. >> >> > _______________________________________________ > Rivendell-dev mailing list > [email protected] > http://caspian.paravelsystems.com/mailman/listinfo/rivendell-dev >
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