Fedora support for Adaptec SATA II Raid Controller - 1420SA

[Aleksandar Milivojevic]

Ronald Nissley wrote:
> Does FC 4 support this card? Adaptec lists support for Red Hat Advanced
> Server 2.1 and Red Hat Enterprise Server 3.0, but doesn't mention
> Fedora. I am looking for SATA functionality as well as RAID 1
> (mirroring). If you know of other SATA/RAID cards supported by Fedora
> please reply with that information. 3ware cards were mentioned some time
> ago, but they're quite out of my budget at $300+.

I'm only 99% sure, but I don't think the card you got does not have any 
RAID functionality.  It's just an ordinary SATA controller with 
specialized driver that does RAID in software.  I believe all Adaptec 
cards where they say "HostRAID" are fake-RAID (I guess the "HostRAID" 
name comes from the fact RAID is implemented by the host in software, 
not by the card in hardware).

There's no such thing as cheap RAID controller.  All those stuff that 
you see listed for low price, it's all fake-RAID.  Implemented in device 
driver software, not on the card.  You'd get exactly the same 
functionality (and often better performance and stability) using regular 
Linux SATA drivers and generic Linux software RAID driver (md driver). 
Either fork $300+ for decent real hardware RAID, or forget about it and 
use generic Linux software RAID driver with whatever controllers/disks 
you already got in your system.

Unfortunately, marketing people started pasting word "RAID" on almost 
about anything, and often it seems that they had a say in technical 
specs too.  These days it is very hard to find out if the card is a real 
RAID controller or fake-RAID just by looking at card's description on 
manufacturers web site (even technical specs are too often plagued with 
"marketing-speak").  Average consumer falls victim to this very often, 
buying additional hardware that is basically something he already got on 
his motherboard: just an regular dumb SATA controller.