SATA Raid 5 recommendation?

[Mark Farmer]

Benjamin J. Weiss wrote:
> All,
> 
> I'm currently planning to put together a MythTV Personal Video Recorder 
> (PVR) box using an AMD Athlon XP 2100+ box that I have at home.
> 
> I would like to have enough HD space so that I can store more than just a 
> few hours of TV shows (so that when we go on vacation, we won't miss 
> anything).  I've been thinking of putting in an SATA RAID 5.  The 
> motherboard I have doesn't support SATA, so I was thinking of buying a 
> Promise RAID 5 SATA controller.
> 
> 1) Are the Promise RAID 5 SATA controller's well supported under Redhat?
> 
> 2) Has anybody had good/bad experiences with them or any other brand?
> 
> I'm planning on putting 4 - 200Gb SATA drives on it, and want something 
> that's going to have decent performance.
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> Ben
> 

I'm planning to do this too using my Athlon 2400+ with 4x 120gb ata drives in raid 5.
The Athlon box will run as a workstation/server/mythtv backend & the mythtv front end on a box 
in the lounge dual boot with xp for games.  The 2 will connect via wireless.

The backend will run software raid 5 on the array (seperate from the OS raid 1 (6 hdd's in 
all)).  The controller I have for the raid 5 is an ITE 8212 - cheap! (£20).  There is no driver 
for it in most kernels so i'll have to build the driver myself but I have used the card very 
sucessfully in previous configs.
 From the research i have done into controllers, the 3ware cards are by far the best & have the 
best support in the Linux kernel but are also the most expensive!  Promise seem to be next in 
line in terms of drivers but I think you need to be a bit carefull that you get one that has a 
driver in the kernel.

Adaptec also do sata raid controllers but i'm not sure which have drivers in the kernel(s).

http://www.adaptec.com/worldwide/product/prodtechindex.html?sess=no&language=English+US&cat=%2fTechnology%2fSerial+ATA

HTH

-- 
Mark Farmer
Linux System Administrator