Raid Card controller for FC System

[Thomas Kappelmueller]

Todd Denniston wrote:
> Roger Heflin wrote, On 03/24/2008 02:20 PM:
>> edwardspl at ita.org.mo wrote:
>>> Alan Cox wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Sun, 23 Mar 2008 15:39:22 +0800
>>>> edwardspl at ita.org.mo wrote:
>>>>
>>>>  
>>>>
>>>>> Dear All,
>>>>>
>>>>> Which model / type of ATA Raid card controller is good for work 
>>>>> with New FC System ?
>>>>> Would you  please recommend ?
>>>>>   
>>>> Almost every 'raid' controller for ATA devices is just driver level 
>>>> raid,
>>>> so equivalent to using the built in lvm/md raid support that works with
>>>> any devices. At the high end there are a few hardware raid cards but 
>>>> they
>>>> rarely outperform ordinary ATA on PCI Express.
>>>>
>>>>
>>
>> Edward,
>>
>> The cheapest 4-port raid cards are typically $300US, the 8-port cards 
>> are quite a bit more.   If you are a home user I would suggest not 
>> wasting your money on the HW raid, and has others mentioned it is not 
>> really worth the extra money for a home user, so use software raid.
>>
>> Most of the cheaper cards are fakeraid and at best (if supported under 
>> DMRAID) are only slightly better than software raid.
>>
>>                              Roger
>>
> 
> So would the better question be:
> Which model / type of ATA multi-port card controller is good when you 
> want to do software RAID with New Fedora System?
> i.e. which manufactures cards that you can hang 4+ drives off of, have 
> enough independence[1] between drives, that doing software RAID works 
> fast[2]?
> Can you get 4+ port SATA cards that don't claim to be "RAID" cards?
> 
> Or has everything already been said here:
> http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Hardware/sata.html
> http://linux-ata.org/faq-sata-raid.html
> 
> [1] I am making the old assumption that ATA drives on the same bus slow 
> each other down.  Does that really matter with SATA?
> 
> [2] assuming the controller card is more likely to be the bottleneck 
> than the processor, PCI bus, or drives.
> 

Hi!
http://linux-ata.org/driver-status.html#matrix
I would buy a card which drivers have the most features.

I chose a cheap "Silicon Image"-chipped sata1 card (sata_sil driver).
Hotplugging etc is working fine.


The sata_sil24 is the SATA2 chip.

-Tom