Hardware recommendation: SATA

[Robin Laing]

Guy Fraser wrote:
> On Wed, 2006-03-05 at 11:35 +0200, Roger Grosswiler wrote:
> 
>>Hey,
>>
>>I look to change my server from scsi to s-ata
>>
>>i have the following in my mind:
>>
>>-Controller: Promise SATA300 TX2plus, 2 Ch. SATA Controller
>>-Disk: Samsung SP2504C, SpinPoint P120, 7200rpm, 250GB, SATA-II
>>
>>as you remark, cheap, cheap, cheap :-)
>>
>>i found some articles online about the promise-controllers SATA150 for
>>Kernels 2.4.x and 2.6.x but nothing about the SATA300.
>>
>>Somebody experienced??
>>
>>Thanks,
>>Roger
>>
> 
> If you are able spend a few more bucks, you might want to get 
> a 3ware raid controller. We just put one in a server and 
> are quite impressed with it. The server has 4 drives, and the 
> we set it up RAID 5 with a spare, the fourth drive stays 
> spun down until you pull one of the other drives, then it spins 
> up and rebuilds the volume.
> 

I have thought about building a RAID box and the issue of hardware over 
software RAID keeps coming up.

At present I am using the onboard SATA and PCI-SATA card for Software 
RAID.  I saw a low cost SATA-II with NCQ for four drives on one WWW site 
but I cannot remember where.  I was looking at getting two of these for 
my new box and using Software RAID.  Of course I haven't written off a 
hardware raid solution yet.

-- 
Robin Laing