IDE controller card and Fedora Core 3

[Robert L Cochran]

You want to RAID5 640 Gb  worth of drives on a Pentium II, 400 MHz 
machine? I'm not a RAID expert. I question whether doing it on an old, 
slow machine with large drives is practical. It seems to me you would 
simply saturate the PCI bus. I read a magazine article (Maximum PC?) 
that tested onboard hardware RAID solutions and they had trouble with 
multiple drives in RAID5 on certain modern motherboards.

I've done software RAID 1 in Red Hat Linux using two, 120 Gb drives with 
good results, but I had a fast machine and that makes a difference. This 
was after trying to implement hardware RAID on an onboard Promise 
PDC20276 controller and failing. I haven't tried it on a Pentium II.

I think you should try software RAID on a faster machine. Heck, maybe 
you'll get by doing software RAID 1 on 2 disks on the Pentium II.  The 
size of the drives might just keep that old CPU busy for ages.

Bob
 
Langdon Stevenson wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I am attempting to build a file server using a Pentium II 400, for my 
> home office.
>
> I want to build a RAID 5 array for data integrity.  I have four 160Gig 
> Western digital hard drives, and a couple of spare IDE controller 
> cards that I would like to use.  The controller cards are the issue.
>
> They are ST-306 Ultra ATA-133 PCI cards from Lycom (see: 
> http://www.lycom.com.tw/ST306.htm for card details).
>
> The chipset is a Silicon Image Sil0680ACL144.
>
> I installed one of these cards with a hard drive attached to test if 
> it would work, but had no luck.  I ran the Fedora Core 3 installer and 
> the card was not detected.  I was not able to find a driver to 
> manually select that looked right.
>
> I spent some time on Google researching Linux and this card/chipset, 
> but found no real clues.  Only windows drivers seem to be available.
>
> Can anyone tell me if this card is likely to be usable?
>
> If not, could anyone suggest a low cost card that can handle the 
> drives I have?
>
> Warning: I am a relative newbie with Linux.  I have built a couple of 
> systems over the last year or so, but am by no means an expert.
>
> Any assistance, or suggestions greatly appreciated.
>
> Regards,
> Langdon
>