Any RAID card recomendations????

[cannonball]

Here is my idea before I go further. I am planning on having the OS (CentOS) on two PATA drives. One in master and the other in slave. As for my RAID question, I would like to be able to have a RAID 5 or JBOD for files concerning web pages and what have you. I will be running this on an Intel system. Are there any that are more user friendly for non MS? I have not tried this with a UNIX/Linux OS before so I'm clueless.

Thanks for your help.
cannonball

[Robert2]

a PATA raid controller? I think you will have to go looking on ebay for one. Also be aware that most of those RAID controllers are not true HW RAID controllers, but simply PATA controllers with special drivers that implement RAID in software. There is some support for that in linux with dmraid (google it).

You best bet is to probably just setup software RAID in Linux, and forget about getting a RAID controller, unless you want to spend the money and get a real RAID setup, which typically means a SCSI/SAS setup.

[cannonball]

I was going to use SATA drives for the array, so it would be a SATA controller.

Left that one out didnt I?!? My bad.

[brunson]

Software RAID is almost always faster than all but the most expensive RAID cards. If your server is not already CPU bound you'd be better off with doing in from the OS. You also have more recovery options in case of a controller failure, you can't take disks off one controller and put it on a different type of controller, whereas you can move your disks to another Linux box if you have hardware problems in the first.

[Robert2]

Well, not only that but you specifically said PATA, which led to my ebay reference.

However, for the most part SATA RAID controllers have the same limitations as PATA RAID controllers, namely that most of them are not true RAID controllers at all, but more or less regular SATA controllers with special drivers that implement the RAID functionality. Again dmraid might be able to help, or you can setup regular Linux software RAID.

The hardware RAID controllers I know about from LSI and Adaptec are typically dual SAS/SATA controllers, but they are not cheap as they are meant for servers.

[cannonball]

Originally Posted by brunson

Software RAID is almost always faster than all but the most expensive RAID cards. If your server is not already CPU bound you'd be better off with doing in from the OS. You also have more recovery options in case of a controller failure, you can't take disks off one controller and put it on a different type of controller, whereas you can move your disks to another Linux box if you have hardware problems in the first.

I'm a noob so correct me if wrong-the floppy that I recieved with my mobo will support any OS then?

[Robert2]

Originally Posted by cannonball

I'm a noob so correct me if wrong-the floppy that I recieved with my mobo will support any OS then?

Absolutely not.

Most likely it contains only a windows driver. And even if it contains a binary Linux driver it will be for a specific enterprise linux version, and it will NOT work with Fedora.

If you wish to use Linux software RAID, just set it up as such during installation. For dmraid setups your on you own, I have never done such a setup.
I have done setups with true hardware RAID controllers (the once with cache, and battery backups) and those are pretty straightforward once the RAID sets are configured, but they are also expensive.

[brunson]

I'm just researching it for myself, but I'll share. dmraid seems to enable you to use the "fake raid" hardware that comes on some motherboards, which is sounds like you have. This is the list of hardware is supports:

ebrunsonlx(~)$ dmraid -l
asr     : Adaptec HostRAID ASR (0,1,10)
ddf1    : SNIA DDF1 (0,1,4,5,linear)
hpt37x  : Highpoint HPT37X (S,0,1,10,01)
hpt45x  : Highpoint HPT45X (S,0,1,10)
isw     : Intel Software RAID (0,1,01)
jmicron : JMicron ATARAID (S,0,1)
lsi     : LSI Logic MegaRAID (0,1,10)
nvidia  : NVidia RAID (S,0,1,10,5)
pdc     : Promise FastTrack (S,0,1,10)
sil     : Silicon Image(tm) Medley(tm) (0,1,10)
via     : VIA Software RAID (S,0,1,10)
dos     : DOS partitions on SW RAIDs

I believe this would be the route if you wanted to RAID your disks and dual boot of the array with windows and linux. A "fakeraid" controller like this still offloads most of the work to the CPU, so if you don't need to share the array with windows you can use the md (multiple device) driver to set up software RAID.

mdadm is the command that controls your software RAID devices. I believe you'd end up creating a boot partition on one of your disks, then you can raid the remainder of the disks using various levels. The mdadm man page covers the gist of the capabilities.

[Evil-I]

Or try checking out proper raid cards such as 3ware, LSI or adaptec.

I've got an old 3ware PATA raid controller in my server that runs 6 x 500Gb hard drives in RAID5. Any volumes setup in the raid card just appear as seperate scsi devices to linux. Works great!

I've played with the cheaper type of raid the so called bios assisted software raid and they tend to be a real pain in linux as you just end up seeing the individual drives and it all gets very messy. I'm no linux expert and so for the sake of my sanity I invested in a proper hardware raid solution.

[brunson]

I've heard good things about the 3ware controllers, but never used one myself.