[rescue] Any Minneapolis area listers ?

[Phil Brutsche]

Clemson, Chris wrote:
>>>> Especially as you can get SATA RAID controllers for ~#300.
>> What specific controllers do you consider good?
>>
>> 3Ware is known to be solid and I can only agree.
> 
> 3ware seem good and according to linuxy people have good linux support.
> Other than that I've no idea I'm afraid - I've never used any myself.

Waaay back in 2000 and 2001 3ware was the only game in town for non-SCSI
RAID. These days it seems the only thing they have going for them is price.

LSI Logic makes SATA RAID cards that use the exact same megaraid drivers
and management utilities as their SCSI RAID cards. I'm partial to those,
I have easily a half dozen in service with an upwards of 1TB on each.

>> Areca seems good but I have no experience with it.
>> Promise supposedly has some real RAID too (EX and maybe SX8
>> series?) but
>> I don't know of any in production use.

Avoid Promise like the plague.

The *only* thing Promise is good for is a JBOD controller for the native
softraid implementation in your OS of choice.

>> Any others that I missed?
> 
> Adaptec do SATA raid too, but a few posts ago someone mentioned that
> linux support for their SCSI boards wasn't very good.
> This is news to me, as all the oldish (4+ years ago) Adaptec SCSI cards
> have worked fine under linux for me.

That was me. Adaptec cards fall into 3 basic categories:

a) Plain SCSI JBOD HBAs - like a 2940 or 29160 - are pretty decent
b) Retail hardware RAID (ie what you find at Newegg) sucks hard and is
effectivly Windows only
c) Hardware RAID where Adaptec is the OEM, like what you find in a Dell
or HP server, works pretty decently *only* because Dell and HP pay
engineers to make sure it works with OSs outside of Windows

What you have most likely falls under category a.

-- 

Phil Brutsche
phil at tux.obix.com