Re: Recommendations for supported 4-port SATA PCI card ?

[Brad Campbell <brad@wasp.net.au>]

Christopher Smith wrote:
> Ian Thurlbeck wrote:
>>
>> Dear All
>>
>> I have 4x500GB Maxtor SATA drives and I want to attach
>> these to a 4-port SATA PCI card and RAID5 them using "md"
>>
>> Could anybody recommend a card that will have out of
>> box support on a Fedora system ?
> 
> I have had a lot of success with Promise TX4 cards, with the caveat that 
>  more than two controllers can't be in the same box (or couldn't as of a 
> few months ago - this may have been fixed).  They're fairly cheap and 

I've been running 3 together in one box for about 18 months, and four in another for a year now... 
the on board BIOS will only pickup 8 drives, but they work just fine under Linux and recognise all 
connected drives.

I have 11 drives in one box (on promise.. 2 on the on-board VIA and 1 on PATA) and 15 drives in 
another (all across 4 promise cards).. all on SATA150-TX4 cards..

Performance sucks.. but then when you put 15 drives on a single PCI 33Mhz bus what do you expect ?
Great for streaming media though.. (and cheap, and very reliable). The only media errors I get are 
on the VIA controller. The promise controllers have not had a single media error since they were 
installed.

Brad
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