Raid Card controller for FC System

Todd Denniston Todd.Denniston at ssa.crane.navy.mil
Mon Mar 24 20:34:26 UTC 2008


Roger Heflin wrote, On 03/24/2008 02:20 PM:
> edwardspl at ita.org.mo wrote:
>> Alan Cox wrote:
>>
>>> On Sun, 23 Mar 2008 15:39:22 +0800
>>> edwardspl at ita.org.mo wrote:
>>>
>>>  
>>>
>>>> Dear All,
>>>>
>>>> Which model / type of ATA Raid card controller is good for work with 
>>>> New FC System ?
>>>> Would you  please recommend ?
>>>>   
>>> Almost every 'raid' controller for ATA devices is just driver level 
>>> raid,
>>> so equivalent to using the built in lvm/md raid support that works with
>>> any devices. At the high end there are a few hardware raid cards but 
>>> they
>>> rarely outperform ordinary ATA on PCI Express.
>>>
>>>
> 
> Edward,
> 
> The cheapest 4-port raid cards are typically $300US, the 8-port cards 
> are quite a bit more.   If you are a home user I would suggest not 
> wasting your money on the HW raid, and has others mentioned it is not 
> really worth the extra money for a home user, so use software raid.
> 
> Most of the cheaper cards are fakeraid and at best (if supported under 
> DMRAID) are only slightly better than software raid.
> 
>                              Roger
> 

So would the better question be:
Which model / type of ATA multi-port card controller is good when you want to 
do software RAID with New Fedora System?
i.e. which manufactures cards that you can hang 4+ drives off of, have enough 
independence[1] between drives, that doing software RAID works fast[2]?
Can you get 4+ port SATA cards that don't claim to be "RAID" cards?

Or has everything already been said here:
http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Hardware/sata.html
http://linux-ata.org/faq-sata-raid.html

[1] I am making the old assumption that ATA drives on the same bus slow each 
other down.  Does that really matter with SATA?

[2] assuming the controller card is more likely to be the bottleneck than the 
processor, PCI bus, or drives.

-- 
Todd Denniston
Crane Division, Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC Crane)
Harnessing the Power of Technology for the Warfighter




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