Re: SATA, RAID, A8N-E, 3800+ help

[Anthony DeRobertis <anthony@derobert.net>]

Lennart Sorensen wrote:

> I think most of them can do volumes on a raid, which is essentially
> partitions.  They show up as seperate drives then.  Of course you can
> also partition the raid device since it is just a disk to the OS.

No. That's different from what Linux software raid can do.

Linux software raid can say, "ok, use sda1, sdb1, sdc1, sdd1 as raid1;
sda2, sdb2, sdc2 as RAID-5 with sdd2 as a hot spare; and finally, sda3,
sdb3, sdc3, and sdd3 as raid0".

Most hardware raid can't do that.

> I was told by a 3ware dealer that many of their users run linux software
> raid on their 12 port cards, because they find with a modern cpu linux
> software raid beats the 3ware hardware raid chip.  So they use it as a
> single card 12 driver sata controller instead.

Interesting. I have several 3ware 9000s in the field, never tried that...

> The hardware raid was easier to manage though.

Definitely. Especially with libata's hot-swap deficiencies.