Sata Raid controllers Jungle

[Olivier Cant <olivier@exxoss.com>]

Hi all,

I'm having a few problems trying to build up a new architecture based on
AMD Opteron board for STorage servers.

I have been usin Tyan Tomcat K8S with an opteron 242 and Go of DDR400
ECC registered memory.?  Thos boards come up with an integrated Silicon
Image Sil 3114 RAID controller.

I have installed Sarge on an IDE drie and I'm trying to set up a RAID 5
array using mdadm on 3 drives to achievea 600 Go storage array.  I'm not
using the embedded SIL3114 Raid features as they are software RAID so
we're better off using kernel RAID as it even outperforms the controller
speeds and is easier to maintain.

Things get weird when I attach Maxtor 300 Go SATA drives to the
controller.  Array creation runs well but it seem imposisble to create a
partition table on the array, and of course I can't setup any file
system on the array either.  I have exactly the same configuration using
250 Go WD drives that works flawless.  Is there any know issue with
Maxtor drives and libata (I guess there is) And if so, is there any hope
I could get this to work one day (Or should I send my twelve Maxtor
drives to oblivion?).

On the other hand I'm seeking advice on buying real hardware RAID
controllers. We are currently running Adaptec single-channel SCSI RAID
in production which is a pleasure.  Poking a bit around internet seems
to show up that 3ware 9xxx series controllers and adaptec SATA Raid
controller are working fine under 2.4.x and 2.6.x kernel.  Does somebody
have some hints on thsi as we are looking into testing a SATA RAID
solution?

Any advice is welcome

Thanks all