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Re: Hardware RAID card suggestions?



On Monday 21 February 2005 08:34, Alvin Oga wrote:
> for hw raid ... for 2 disks .. is it worth the $250 for the hw raid
> card ??

Yes it is. :)

>  - if monitoring is important, which it is in a raid world, the
>  metrics you can monitor and watch is limited to the hardware
>  vendor's support
>
>  - 3ware.com cards are "cheap", and you can get $20,000 hw raid
>  controllers too :-)

I use 3ware with 3 disks (Raid5) and I'm very satisfied with this 
controller. It's supported out of the box, the driver is included in 
Linux kernels. 3ware has also a monitoring tool, which allows me to use 
a webbrowser to check the status and the logs. I also get email 
notification to multiple accounts when something is wrong.

>
> for hw raid ..
>  - stay away from onboard motherboard raid controllers
>  - i'd personally avoid highpoint and promise fastblah etc
>
>  ( leaving only 3ware as the hw raid controllers for $300 range )
>
>  - even better, i'd avoid hw raid all together for lack
>  of proper monitoring
>
> for 2 disks ... i think its easy/faster/better with sw raid
>  - more monitoring capabilities and options

SW raid was very slow in my case (using onboard SI3112 SATA chip), 
because only PIO mode worked reliably (at least in kernel 2.4.25). When 
I turned on DMA I got IO errors. :(
When switching from kernel 2.4 to 2.6 SW raid stopped working, because 
the device changed from /dev/md0 to /dev/sda1 for the first 
partition... and I wasn't aware of that. So, that was the point where I 
scrapped SW Raid and got a proper RAID controller.

Cheers
Arne
-- 
Arne Götje (高盛華) <20030910antispam@gmx.net> 
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