Re: Hardware RAID
I know its been some time since this post, im primarily responding
for the archives, maybe someone will find the info usefulll..
i was looking for the exact same thing, an inexpensive hardware RAID
controller. (something in the hundreds of dollars as apposed to the
thousands). What i wfound was the AAA-13x card, its an adaptec hardware
raid. and i looked on the hardware compatability list and it was listed
etc. however...
I got the card working, booted up off its cmos disk to flash
the cards rom with the settings, and set it up as a RAID-1 ( i had
2 26 gig drives and just wanted mirroring). and the card was detected
and all i had no problems as far as that was concerned and I even
saw as i was installing debian both drives were active when it was
installing to just the first drive "great" i thought. but the more i
read the manual and stuff the more it seemed like in order to restore
the secondary drive to use as a primary (if the original primary failed) was
to use their proprietary windows software to rebuild the array. the disk
they provide to setup the array (that you boot off) didnt have any
rebuild features. so when it came down to it... i realized i could not
use the hardware raid without the software program utilities.
the cost was about the price of two adaptec 2940's and in the end. i ended
up removing the array completely, and using the controller as just a
scsi controller and wasting the RAID features. so now i have two drives.
and i dd'd the contents of th first to the second.. and run a script
that diffs the specified files that i want to back up and overwrites
the newer file onto the second hard drive whenever its been updated.
so if there is a problem with the first drive, i can just put the
secondary in the primary slot and boot right up on it no problem.
kind of a hacked raid-1 i guess. it works good and i dont have to worry
about rebuilding arrays or whatever.
hope this helps someone about to make the same mistake, or maybe someone
has had bette rluck with the same card, if so please tell me all about it!
On Sat, Apr 08, 2000 at 08:15:13AM -0600, elyograg wrote:
> I've been looking through kernel readme files, and trying to find a
> hardware RAID solution that will run under Debian. It seems that all of
> the RAID hardware that is supported in the 2.2 kernel is either very very
> expensive, or impossible to find. The controllers that are affordable,
> aren't supported. I did briefly look at the 2.3 kernel, but there didn't
> seem to be any additional support.
>
> We're planning to go with 5-7 U2W drives in a level 5 array, probably
> sticking with 7200 RPM. The 160Mb standard on 10,000 RPM drives would be
> very nice, but the price increases are staggering. We'll try to find the
> current pricing sweet spot and purchase drives at that capacity. We don't
> need the full redundant power, hot swappable setup - our concern is speed
> and reliability. If we have to take it down because of a hardware failure,
> we're OK with that. :)
>
> Does anyone have any recommendations for a hardware RAID controller with a
> good combination of price and Linux support, and at least one supplier who
> carries it?
>
> I know I can do software RAID, and this idea hasn't been completely
> discounted, but I'm very interested in the potential for just letting the
> hardware take care of it. The only case I know of with software RAID
> (level 1) was difficult to work with, as it was extremely slow to
> fsck/rebuild if there were any problems. Anyone have any other horror or
> success stories with either hardware or software RAID to share?
>
> If we go the software route, would there be any issue with simply getting
> something like the Adaptec 2940U2W? Any other solid recommendations, and
> reasoning to support the choice?
>
> Thanks,
> Shawn
>
>
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--
- Nick Jennings
Email: nick@namodn.com
Web : http://nick.namodn.com
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