[K12OSN] Hard Drive Upgrade Quandry

[Jim McQuillan]

Have you looked at the 3ware ide raid controllers?

I've used them, and they are awesome.  Fully supported by the Linux
kernel since way back in the 2.2.x days.

As for Promise controllers, i've never heard anybody say anything good
about them.  The little bit of playing that I did with a Promise card
was not a good experience.  It wasn't a raid card, just a normal IDE
controller, but it seemed to be a pain in the butt to set up.

Jim McQuillan
jam at Ltsp.org



On Fri, 26 Nov 2004, Calvin Dodge wrote:

> Liam Marshall wrote:
> >
> > I would like to get a Promise IDE raid controller, either the 4 or 6
>
> Make sure it's compatible with a stock Linux kernel.  Typically, the
> low-priced RAID controllers are software-based (the driver hides this fact
> from the operating system), and sometimes the drivers are provided in
> binary-only format (like the Promise controller at one customer's location,
> which provided modules only for kernels from RH 7.2).  You're really best off
> with a card with open-source drivers (like 3Ware, though I suspect that's out
> of your price range).
>
> > channel version, haven't decided yet.  I was going to put on it 4 - 80 GB
> > EIDE hard drives with 7200 rpm and 8MB cache each.  I would use these in a
> > raid 0+1 or raid 1+0 configuration.  It is my understanding that this will
> > give me the best of both mirroring for redundancy, and parity/spanning for
> > performance.
>
> Yes, although 2 80 gig drives cost quite a bit more than 1 160 gig drive.
>
> > If I am right in my understanding of raid levels 4 - 80GB drives in such a
> > configuration will give me 160GB of storage space, with the other 160GB of
> > the drives being used in a mirrored capacity right?
>
> Yes.
>
> Calvin
> --
> Calvin Dodge
> Certified Linux Bigot (tm)
> http://www.caldodge.fpcc.net
>
>