[K12OSN] Hard Drive Upgrade Quandry

["Terrell Prudé, Jr."]

Agreed on the Promise controller issue.  I haven't tried out Promise 
PATA controllers, but I have tried out Promise SATA RAID controllers, 
and I despise them.  The problem is that, like Calvin wrote, Promise is 
one of these companies that wants to pretend that it's protecting its 
so-called "intellectual property" and refuses to release the programming 
specs for its hardware to the Free Software community.  Stay away from 
anything with Promise's name on it.

Sadly, the same must apply to HighPoint's RAID controllers, when they're 
in RAID mode.  In JBOD mode, though, combined with the 2.6 kernel, 
they're fine.

One other option might be this, if the 3ware controllers are indeed out 
of your budget:  The 2.6 kernel does support SATA now.  I know this from 
experience using it; it even works with the nForce2 motherboard 
chipset's SATA ports.  You could do Linux-kernel software RAID 1 with a 
couple of 160GB SATA disks, which I have running right now for a 
customer of mine.  The OS is sitting on a PATA drive (80GB), and /home 
lives on the Linux-kernel SATA RAID.  The performance seems to be just 
fine.  The one downer is that, with Red Hat / Fedora distros, I find 
Linux-kernel RAID a pain to set up--very possible, I assure you, but 
tedious, which is why I started putting only /home on the RAID 1.  You 
can always restore the OS from your backups, which you should be making 
anyway.  You are doing this, right?  If not, then I'd stress to the 
school board the need for regular backups, regardless of which operating 
system you're using!

--TP

Jim McQuillan wrote:

>Have you looked at the 3ware ide raid controllers?
>
>I've used them, and they are awesome.  Fully supported by the Linux
>kernel since way back in the 2.2.x days.
>
>As for Promise controllers, i've never heard anybody say anything good
>about them.  The little bit of playing that I did with a Promise card
>was not a good experience.  It wasn't a raid card, just a normal IDE
>controller, but it seemed to be a pain in the butt to set up.
>
>Jim McQuillan
>jam at Ltsp.org
>
>
>
>On Fri, 26 Nov 2004, Calvin Dodge wrote:
>
>  
>
>>Liam Marshall wrote:
>>    
>>
>>>I would like to get a Promise IDE raid controller, either the 4 or 6
>>>      
>>>
>>Make sure it's compatible with a stock Linux kernel.  Typically, the
>>low-priced RAID controllers are software-based (the driver hides this fact
>>from the operating system), and sometimes the drivers are provided in
>>binary-only format (like the Promise controller at one customer's location,
>>which provided modules only for kernels from RH 7.2).  You're really best off
>>with a card with open-source drivers (like 3Ware, though I suspect that's out
>>of your price range).
>>
>>    
>>
>>>channel version, haven't decided yet.  I was going to put on it 4 - 80 GB
>>>EIDE hard drives with 7200 rpm and 8MB cache each.  I would use these in a
>>>raid 0+1 or raid 1+0 configuration.  It is my understanding that this will
>>>give me the best of both mirroring for redundancy, and parity/spanning for
>>>performance.
>>>      
>>>
>>Yes, although 2 80 gig drives cost quite a bit more than 1 160 gig drive.
>>
>>    
>>
>>>If I am right in my understanding of raid levels 4 - 80GB drives in such a
>>>configuration will give me 160GB of storage space, with the other 160GB of
>>>the drives being used in a mirrored capacity right?
>>>      
>>>
>>Yes.
>>
>>Calvin
>>--
>>Calvin Dodge
>>Certified Linux Bigot (tm)
>>http://www.caldodge.fpcc.net
>>
>>
>>    
>>
>
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>  
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