SATA RAID controller recommendations

[Gavin McDonald]

Just to add my 2c:

I recently tried getting RHEL to work on a dual-opteron ASUS board, with
dual onboard SATA hardware raid controllers. One was part of the NVIDIA
chipset, the other was a "Silicon Image" Controller.  Long story short, I
replaced the SATA drives with IDE drives instead.

To start with, I couldn't boot a stable kernel off of the original Red CDs
(Box-Set), so I d/l the latest RHEL3 ISOs, which at least booted.  (We're a
'3' shop until I can migrate _everything_ to 4...).  Now with a stable
kernel, the Mfr-Supplied Driver disks were still useless.  Not once was I
able to boot to the install GUI, unless I had an IDE drive attached as well.

If you can go to RHEL4, the controllers are detected, and the drives appear
in disk druid,  however, even with the hardware BIOS setup for RAID0 or
RAID1, the druid shows 2 separate drives...

So that was my tale of woe, If someone has had better experiences with
either controller, or perhaps notices a flaw in my logic, (gasp!) please
feel free to tell me so. :)  (This is after all, a mailing list ;)

Regards,
-G


-----Original Message-----
From: redhat-list-bounces at redhat.com [mailto:redhat-list-bounces at redhat.com]
On Behalf Of Chris
Sent: Tuesday, August 02, 2005 3:15 PM
To: redhat-list at redhat.com
Subject: Re: SATA RAID controller recommendations

Michael's Stationery----- Original Message ----- 
From: Michael Cohn
Sent: Tuesday, August 02, 2005 2:54 PM
Subject: SATA RAID controller recommendations

> I just saw your post from back in November regarding
> SATA RAID controller recommendations.
>
> http://info.ccone.at/INFO/Mil-Archives/redhat/Nov-2004
>  /msg00119.html
>
> What controller did you wind up using?  I just purchsaed a
> Dell PowerEdge 420sc with 2x80gb SATA drives and would
> like to add a hardware RAID controller.  My plan is to run
> either Fedora 3/4 or SuSe.

Michael,

By far the best SATA RAID controllers with great support for Linux come from

3WARE.  If you only have 2 drives, you can get away with their basic (~$120)

model which can do RAID-0 and RAID-1, the 8006-2LP.  It works great!  We 
have everything they make from the basic 2-port model all the way up to a 
12-port models which run our 3TB storage backup systems.

Stay away from Adaptec and Promise controllers.  Promise controllers have 
serious issues with drivers and stability, while Adaptec outright abandons 
brand new products and doesn't provide almost any Linux support.  We had to 
toss several dozen of their 'brand new' zero channel SCSI RAID 2015S 
controllers because they announced that they would not provide drivers for 
kernel 2.6 - meaning FC2 and above, RHEL 4, etc.  They seem to be a "Windows

only" shop these days.  I know it has nothing to do with SATA, but as a 
company in general I wouldn't buy any of their products anymore, not after 
spending thousands on controllers that we had to replace less than 6 months 
later because Adaptec decided they were going to support Windows only.

Chris 


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