Re: Adaptect (and other) ATA cards
On Sunday 23 October 2005 06:49 am, Roberto C. Sanchez wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 22, 2005 at 10:04:56PM -0400, Hal Vaughan wrote:
> > I've been searching for RAID cards and regular ATA cards. I want to use
> > either a good hardware RAID card that supports RAID 5, or an ATA card
> > that works well with Linux. While searching, I've found more comments
> > online about RAID cards that do NOT work well with Linux than ones that
> > do. Even when I've found a good RAID card (as in works with Linux), it
> > turns out a lot of people have serious trouble with it.
> >
> > So, for now, I'm simplifying it and looking for an ATA card and planning
> > on using mdadm to run the RAID. Whatever I get, I want to put it in and
> > have it running quickly. I've found an Adaptec 133/100 Ultra ATA card
> > (ASH-1233), but I can't find anything clear about using it on Linux.
> > Usually if a card is bad, I see a lot of problems on the web, but when I
> > searched for info on this card, I found hardly anything -- and nothing
> > really useful except for 1 bad experience, which could have been due to
> > hardware failure.
> >
> > So are IDE cards so standardized that I don't find many hits on them when
> > looking for Linux compatibility because it is a non-issue (like trying to
> > find a Linux compatible hard drive would give few hits because it is a
> > non-issue), or is there some other reason I can't find much on this
> > Adaptec card in specific and IDE cards in general?
>
> Check out this thread please:
>
> http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2005/10/msg00347.html
That's a good possibility. I was hoping to get one ASAP, so I wouldn't have
to go for a temporary solution. (I'm on a schedule with this system and if I
don't get it up and running by deadline, it's at least a week before I can do
the final checkout, since another system needs some of the same resources
during the week.)
What I'm still not clear on is if IDE cards are, like the IDE ports on a
motherboard, are so generic that it doesn't really matter which card I use.
Even with the card mentioned in the link, when I tried to search, I found
NOTHING on Linux compatibility, and only links to sales pages.
> > Also, if anyone has a RAID card that does hardware RAID, without using
> > the driver to do all the work, and can do RAID 5 (and, preferably, is hot
> > swappable under Linux), I'd like to hear about it.
>
> Be aware that you would have to spend upwards of a couple of thousand
> dollars to get a good, reliable card that does "real" hardware RAID.
> Many cards that are advertised as doing hardware RAID are really just
> doing software RAID in the firmware or somewhere else on the card. They
> are generally not even eas reliable or high performing as a purely
> software RAID setup in the Linux kernel, or so I have been told.
The more I looked into it, the more I was sure that was the case. For this
server, I'm going with adding an extra IDE card. The next upgrade will
probably be when I can afford that, along with a new case so I can have hot
swappable drives I can get to without opening it all up.
But that's a while off.
Hal
Reply to: