Re: what is the best multi-SATA-controller-on-a-single-board out there?

[Tim Small <tim@buttersideup.com>]

Jon Lewis wrote:

>On Mon, 2 Aug 2004, Tim Small wrote:
>  
>
>>The Promise cards, are cheap, but only do 66Mhz/32 bit PCI and provide
>>four SATA ports, so they may not be well suited to some boards..  Both
>>chipsets were used with libata on 2.6 kernels, with a mixture of s/w
>>raid5, and s/w raid1.  The only slight irritation is the current lack of
>>smartd support (pending libata driver support).
>>    
>>
>
>With what distros / exactly which kernels?  I've been testing a system
>  
>
I'm using kernel.org 2.6.8rc2 (also used 2.6.5rc3), with libata on 
Debian/Sarge (not that the distribution should matter, this is all 
kernel side stuff) - both on Xeons, and Opterons, all filesystems are 
ext3.  I was expecting to have some hassle with these systems, but have 
had none up to now (in service a few months).  The revised (minor) 
shortcoming list is:

. Sustained throughput not as high as the PATA based arrays (yet)
. No hot-plug support (yet)
. No smartd support (yet)

Tim.