Re: Which raid card to buy for Sarge

["Ralph Paßgang" <ralph@debianbase.de>]

Am Mittwoch, 31. März 2004 18:58 schrieben Sie:
> <me@heyjay.com> writes:
> > Seems like 3ware is the card of choice.  I'll probably pick one up at
> > cdw, unless anyone knows where I can get them on the cheap.
> >
> > Speaking of cheap, anyone ever have any luck with the Highpoint
> > RocketRaid cards on Sarge?
>
> I don't use debian, but my rocketraid is doing well with recent kernels.
>
> > They're roughly 80% the price of 3ware (maybe you get what you pay
> > for)
>
> 80%?  You must mean 20%.  The Highpoint cards are software raid cards,
> meaning that they are just regular ATA cards with a "RAID" label
> slapped on the box.

If would not use the "raid" feature of the Highpoint cards, because it is only 
software raid and not so performant as a hardware raid. If you don't need a 
high-end system, then you can make a software raid with linux standard tools 
like: mdadm. If you need performance, then you should think about a scsi raid 
setup and a good adapter, maybe adaptec or 3ware or something like that.

If software raid, then I would prefer a linux software raid (with mdadm for 
example) and would not use not good supported third-party software raid 
"drivers". For mdadm you will find more support and you can migrate the disks 
in another linux box and it will read the raid... With the Highpoint raid 
function you are forced to continue using the highpoint card.

And just for your information, you don't have to look after a card that is 
specially supported by Debian. Debian uses a normal linux kernel (+ some 
patches, but nothing revolutionary) so it can handle each raid adapter that 
is supported by the linux kernel... It's the same for SuSE and RedHat, 
because they support each adapter supported by the standard linux kernel plus 
maybe some patched-in drivers). But even when the adapter is not supported in 
the vanilla kernel you can patch a kernel-source by yourself... But it is 
always a good decision to only use hardware that is supported in a stock 
kernel.

So better look after general linux support. I think there is not one piece of 
hardware that is declared as: "ready for debian sarge" :))
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