Re: Review of SATA RAID controllers

Hi Juan-Carlos:

   I usually recommend 3ware cards.  They tend to work best with my systems.

Joe

Bogdan Costescu wrote:
> [ Please don't post messages as attachemnts. ]
> 
> Juan Carlos Castro y Castro wrote:
> 
> 
>>Anyone has experience of any of the beasts reviewed here working
>>well with Tao/RHEL? Particularly the better-recommended ones? (I'm
>>willing to accept "yes, but only with Tao/RHEL 4" as an answer)
>>
>>http://www.tweakers.net/reviews/557
> 
> 
> 
> I haven't read the article yet, but I have 2 of the cards:
> 
> - Promise FastTrak S150 SX4 works with RHEL3/4, buthas no support for
> any RAID level. The only RAID driver that Promise offers is for RH9
> and doesn't work for RHEL3/4. The open-source driver (sata_sx4) allows
> the drives to be used as individual disks, but the performance that
> I've obtained is very bad (<10Mb/s) - probably the fact that data has
> to be copied to the internal memory first in any direction slows down
> the transfer and is not related to the driver per-se. My query to the
> linux-ide list at the end of last year about progress for this driver
> in terms of adding RAID support remained unanswered.
> 
> - HighPoint RocketRAID 1820A doesn't really have a "hardware RAID
> engine"; if it has one it's very well hidden and it provides the same
> speed as the software RAID. It's built with Marvell chip(s), but there
> is so far no open-source driver for it, although Jeff Garzik (libata
> author) said on the linux-ide list that a driver will be written soon.
> HighPoint offers a partly open-source driver which works pretty well,
> but doesn't offer any speed advantage over software RAID (md). When
> using the drives as JBOD (no RAID) with md on top of them, sometimes
> the driver stopped responding (and the disks were unreachable), 
> although the rest of the system was fine - the only remedy is to 
> reboot.
> 
> You can find some more details about SATA RAID support at:
> 
> http://www.linuxmafia.com/faq/Hardware/sata.html and
> http://linux.yyz.us/sata/
> 

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Joseph Landman, Ph.D
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