Re: RAID5 over Serial-ATA success stories?

[Daniel Brahneborg <basic@wtnord.net>]

Thanks for the feedback, it's very valuable to me.

On Wed, Jan 07, 2004 at 10:56:32PM +0100, Måns Rullgård wrote:
> Daniel Brahneborg <daniel.com@wtnord.net> writes:
> 
> > I'd like to hear some success stories for RAID5 on Serial-ATA disks.
> > Which Serial-ATA card are you using?  Do you get decent performance?
> > Is it stable with DMA enabled?  Do you use the 2.4 or 2.6 kernel?
> >
> > I know this much:
> >
> > It doesn't work with Silicon Image.
> 
> What doesn't work?  There are drivers, at least in 2.6.  Raid should
> care about what sort of disks you use.

When using it for normal disks e2fsck reports bad blocks all
over the disk. When used for RAID, I get corrupted data.  Not
much, maybe every second time for a file of 500MB.
This is with the IDE driver.  With the SCSI driver, my computer
completely freezes when I activate my second network card (as I
reported earlier, unfortunately still without a solution).
RAID might work with that driver, but unless the network card
problem is solved, that doesn't help me.

> > It doesn't work with VIA (yet, anyway).
> > It might work with HighPoint.
> 
> I've run RAID5 on a Highpoint RocketRAID 1540.  I used ATA disks with
> SATA converters, though.  Works with both 2.4 and 2.6.

Sounds good to hear.  It's the second cheapest card for me.

> > It probably works with Promise.
> > I don't know if there's a driver for Adaptec.
> 
> Which Adaptec card?  The 12xx cards are fakeraid, but are supported as
> normal cards.  The 24xx cards are true hardware RAID cards.  Linux
> drivers exist for these, too.

It's the 12xx cards that I'm looking at. I don't want hardware
RAID, since hardware RAID5 costs an infinite amount of money.

> > In case I have to replace my Silicon Image card, what should I replace
> > it with?  I'm currently leaning towards Promise TX4 (or TX2 if the VIA
> > driver is completed).
> 
> I stay as far away as I can from Promise and VIA.  Anything is usually
> better than those two.

Why the warning about Promise?  The reason I want the VIA
driver to work is that I've got two VIA connectors on the
motherboard, so I only need a 2 port SATA card.

/Basic