NYCPHP Meetup

[Dan Cech]

Personally I have had a love/hate relationship with RAID.  I purchased 
one of the first ever mainboards with onboard RAID, an ABIT KA7-100 
which was using a Highpoint (HPT370) chip, and 2 of then then top of the 
line 20GB WD drives.  Unfortunately for me, I never managed to get it to 
work properly, and in the end gave up on RAID for a while.

My latest experience was with the Promise FasTrak SX4000, which at the 
time I set it up was the latest and greatest in IDE RAID.  I cannot say 
enough good things about this card, or the Western Digital J series (in 
my case WD800JB) drives.  I put 256MB of RAM in the card and built a 
RAID 5 array for a total of 240Gb of storage space.

Unfortunately my machine was using a no-name 300W PSU which couldn't 
handle the load of the 4 Western Digitals, plus another 2 non-RAID 
drives, etc and was having serious power issues.  The result of this was 
that every few days the RAID would drop a drive and have to be rebuilt, 
this occurred 4 or 5 times before I figured out what was going on and 
replaces the PSU, since then the machine and RAID have been solid as a 
rock (and at no time did I lose any data).

I know there are sources available for at least some of the promise 
cards, and I believe the 2.6 kernel has support for the TX4 family of 
cards.  I haven't used the Promise cards under linux myself so YMMV.

The adaptec cards pointed out by Michael Hanulec look like they might be 
just the ticket though.

I would definitely recommend you go with the WD drives, I have been very 
happy with them in the past and they seem to work well in RAID setups.

Dan

Alan T. Miller wrote:

> I do not reccomend the Promise Controller if you plan to run Linux. I got
> stuck with two machines that had a built in promise IDE RAID controller and
> ended up having to disable the onborad promise controllerse and go with
> software RAID because they do not support the latest linux kernels. If you
> do not mind running outdated kernels with security problems, than perhaps
> the promise controller will be fine. If you are a concerned linux admin,
> than it is best to steer clear of the promise RAID controller all together.
> 
> Alan
> 
> 
> 
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Chris Bielanski" <Cbielanski at inta.org>
> To: "'NYPHP Talk'" <talk at lists.nyphp.org>
> Sent: Thursday, March 11, 2004 11:51 AM
> Subject: RE: [nycphp-talk] OT - IDE Raid cards
> 
> 
> 
>>Everyone I know that has needed this functionality in a moderate- to
>>low-cost solution goes with Promise100 controllers and multiple identical
>>drives of their own liking, though most end up being Western Digital.
>>~C
>>
>>
>>>-----Original Message-----
>>>From: Evan Heller [mailto:evan.heller at alum.rpi.edu]
>>>Sent: Wednesday, March 10, 2004 5:23 PM
>>>To: evan.heller at alum.rpi.edu
>>>Subject: [nycphp-talk] OT - IDE Raid cards
>>>
>>>
>>>Hi:
>>>
>>>I'm looking for opinions on what IDE raid cards are good
>>>performers and cost
>>>wise what is suggested. I'm looking to do simple mirroring
>>>and the ability
>>>to have 4 or more drives. Yes, I understand IDE raid is not
>>>as good as SCSI
>>>raid at the moment and I do use SCSI raid for my primary
>>>systems, but I
>>>would like to implement an IDE raid for backup purposes. I
>>>currently use a
>>>scsi perc 3 card with 128 megs of memory so I'm used to the
>>>feature set of a
>>>card of that type.
>>>
>>>So what do you guys recommend? Please list features/cost .
>>>Thanks a bunch
>>>
>>>-Evan
>>>
>>>_______________________________________________
>>>talk mailing list
>>>talk at lists.nyphp.org
>>>http://lists.nyphp.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
>>>
>>
>>_______________________________________________
>>talk mailing list
>>talk at lists.nyphp.org
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>>
> 
> 
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