Hardware RAID Cards..

Luke Dean LukeD at pobox.com
Thu May 26 14:58:45 PDT 2005


On Tue, 24 May 2005, Kirk Strauser wrote:
> On Tuesday 24 May 2005 09:57, Aaron C. Meadows wrote:
>
>> My question is, since that chipset is unsupported for hardware RAID,
>> would I be better off to software RAID them, or get a different RAID
>> card?
>
> What RAID level do you plan on using?  Mirroring shouldn't use much CPU, for
> example, but parity might put a bit of a load on a hard-working system.
>
> That's a good question, though.  Several cards are listed in the hardware
> compatibility notes, but they stop short of saying "this card is completely
> supported" or "stay away from this one".  What cards have people had good
> luck with in practice?

I've been using a Promise FastTrak S150 TX2/plus for close to a couple of 
years now.  It supports two parallel and two serial ATA drives.  I bought 
it to support my parallel ATA drives and then I thought I'd migrate to 
SATA, but I haven't done so yet.
I've got two parallel drives in a RAID1 (mirrored) array.  This 
configuration is discouraged by the manufacturer because the drives have 
to share a cable and failure on one drive will very likely lock up the 
system, but that's not really important to me.  I'm more worried about 
hardware failure than uninterrupted uptime.

I've been using this setup since FreeBSD version 5.2, and I'm currently 
running 5.4.
The dmesg looks like:
atapci0: <Promise PDC20371 SATA150 controller> port 
0x9800-0x987f,0x9400-0x940f,0x9000-0x903f mem 
0xfb000000-0xfb01ffff,0xfb027000-0xfb027fff i q 22 at device 2.0 on pci2
atapci0: failed: rid 0x20 is memory, requested 4

That little failure at the end has always been there in one form or 
another.  It doesn't seem to hinder operation as far as I can tell though.

I've only had to use the built-in maintenance utilities once to fix 
something, and that was after a really bad kernel upgrading accident.  It 
worked fine.  Overall I'm happy with this card.


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