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Home > Archive > Cheap Linux Hardware > September 2004 > Serial ATA Solution
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Serial ATA Solution
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| John Yarborough 2004-09-24, 2:47 am |
| I am currently looking into several different entry-level server
solutions. I really like the looks and specs of SATA but my recent
experience with it has not been good. What I am looking for is a SATA
controller that will work with a linux distribution out of the box
without having to rebuild a custom installation disk. Specifically I
am wanting to work with Fedora Core 2 or Fedora Core 3 when it is
released. I have found two SATA RAID controllers that sound appealing:
the 3Ware 8506-4LP and the Adaptec 2410SA. They both appear to be
hardware based so I assume they stand the best chance of achieving
what I want, which is to be able to install a stock version of Fedora
Core 2 (or really any 2.6 based distro) onto a RAID-1 array without
any special drivers or modules. Is it possible? Does anyone have any
feedback on either card? Anyone have a better recommendation?
Basically any feedback would be greatly appreciated. BTW - I am
wanting to avoid software RAID mainly for two reasons: my boss does
not like it because of bad experiences with it under the Windows
platform, and second because it does not have good support for hotplug
devices (atleast to my knowledge, may be wrong).
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| Wiseguy 2004-09-24, 2:47 am |
| jyarborough@acropolistech.com (John Yarborough) tried to express:
> Basically any feedback would be greatly appreciated. BTW - I am
> wanting to avoid software RAID mainly for two reasons: my boss does
> not like it because of bad experiences with it under the Windows
> platform, and second because it does not have good support for hotplug
> devices (atleast to my knowledge, may be wrong).
your boss is a smart man...Never use software raid if you can afford
a hardware solution. and yes, find a hardware raid controller that
masks the disks from the OS and presents only the logical raid units
created by the controller so that no custom drivers are necessary.
Unfortunately my raid experience is on the bigger high availability
products by vendors like EMC and hitachi so I cannot recommend a specific
solution.
If budget allows then maybe look into a scsi based high availability
array that can be shared between multiple servers and even works in a
SAN storage area network.
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| Davide Bianchi 2004-09-24, 2:47 am |
| On 2004-09-24, John Yarborough <jyarborough@acropolistech.com> wrote:
> experience with it has not been good. What I am looking for is a SATA
> controller that will work with a linux distribution out of the box
> without having to rebuild a custom installation disk.
Never used Fedora but Adaptec worked out-of-the-box with Slackware
and he DOES support hardware raid. Now, since Slack distribute a
vanilla kernel, I guess Fedora does support it too.
Davide
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| Rick Moen 2004-09-24, 2:47 am |
| John Yarborough <jyarborough@acropolistech.com> wrote:
> I have found two SATA RAID controllers that sound appealing:
> the 3Ware 8506-4LP and the Adaptec 2410SA.
Sure, those are both good. An LSI Logic MegaRAID SATA 150-2 or 150-4
would be good, too.
> They both appear to be hardware based so I assume they stand the best
> chance of achieving what I want, which is to be able to install a
> stock version of Fedora Core 2 (or really any 2.6 based distro) onto a
> RAID-1 array without any special drivers or modules. Is it possible?
Sure, and you don't need 2.6, either.
> BTW - I am wanting to avoid software RAID mainly for two reasons: my
> boss does not like it because of bad experiences with it under the
> Windows platform, and second because it does not have good support for
> hotplug devices (atleast to my knowledge, may be wrong).
Linux's own kernel-based software RAID ("md" driver) is actually very
reliable and has such low overhead on typical Linux deployments that you
never notice the CPU load.
If you have one of the above cards, which do genuine hardware RAID, then
you don't need the "md" driver, but "md" is a heck of a lot better than
the "fakeraid" (software-driven RAID) all the other SATA chipsets do.
More at: "Serial ATA" on http://linuxmafia.com/kb/Hardware/ .
--
Cheers, "Why is the alphabet in that order? Is it because of that song?"
Rick Moen -- Steven Wright
rick@linuxmafia.com
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