Thought I would go ahead and chime in here, as I have an applicable experience.<br><br>My backend is running an areca ARC-1210 [ <a href="http://www.areca.com.tw/products/pcie.htm">http://www.areca.com.tw/products/pcie.htm
</a> ] running in an athlon 64 machine w/ 4x200GB raid 5 (unformatted 600GB). (Wish I had dual core, I have this machine handling a ton of other tasks and it pretty much has a constant load average of 1.5 - 2.0 ). The card has an open source driver written by their own engineer, which is available in the -mm patch set. I don't know if it has yet made it into the mainline kernel. I patched the kernel, installed it, and excluded any kernel updates from yum so I don't destroy the driver.
<br><br>On top of that, the card has a web server running on it that has all the configuration and testing capabilities that are available in the bios screen. Through a little utility of theirs (which is prone to memory leaks), you can forward outside of the machine however you want. Also has a full set of command line tools. I'm not sure about hot-swapping though.
<br><br>The thing has been rock solid, I highly recommend it.<br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 2/8/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">Andreas Ntaflos</b> <<a href="mailto:daff@dword.org">daff@dword.org</a>> wrote:
</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">On Friday 09 February 2007 00:23:18 Stroller wrote:<br>> On 8 Feb 2007, at 20:52, Robert Kulagowski wrote:
<br>> > ...<br>> > Yes, I have a 5x320GB RAID-5 on a 9500S-12. One of the drives is<br>> > currently out and RMAd to Seagate, so I'm running with only 4 drives.<br>> ><br>> > I didn't have to power down the server to pull the drive - the RAID
<br>> > card<br>> > had already bypassed the drive because it was throwing errors.<br>><br>> That's very useful to hear.<br>><br>> What are the drivers like for the 9500? OSS?<br>> Written by the manufacturer? Part of the main kernel tree?
<br><br>As far as I can see it's in the main kernel:<br><br>$ grep 3W /usr/src/linux/.config<br># CONFIG_BLK_DEV_3W_XXXX_RAID is not set<br># CONFIG_SCSI_3W_9XXX is not set<br><br>> I have an old Compaq Proliant 6500 running as a home server at the
<br>> moment, but I haven't been able to migrate all my services to it<br>> because of some glitches which I just don't seem to be able to track<br>> down. My best guess is that either my hardware is flaky or simply
<br>> that Linux no longer properly supports well such an old & obscure<br>> system. Certainly some of the diagnostic utilities don't work very<br>> well - I don't think it's possible to determine drive status under
<br>> Linux - and you can't spin down the (very loud) fans. Simply put life<br>> would be easier if I were able to replace it and drive space would be<br>> cheaper using SATA.<br>><br>> I'd be very interested to hear any other recommendations for an SATA
<br>> hardware RAID card that supports hot-swap & can be fully configured<br>> under Linux. Although (considering the typical £1:$1 import rate<br>> conversion) I'd prefer to pay less than $309, that price is
<br>> acceptable and far more important is driver support. I'd like a hot-<br>> swap card that can easily be queried for driver status using the CLI,<br>> logs errors to syslog and which can be expected to be supported under
<br>> Linux forever & a day (I thought I might look at some of those with<br>> OpenBSD support, reasoning these cards are likely to have open driver<br>> documentation & good Linux support, too).<br><br>The new libata stuff made it into the
2.6.19 mainline kernel and supports many<br>SATA controllers, especially the cheap ones (EUR 50,00--100,00), but not many<br>have driver support for hotswap. Check out<br><br><a href="http://linux-ata.org/driver-status.html">
http://linux-ata.org/driver-status.html</a><br><br>where you can see what hardware is supported and which features are available.<br>Don't forget to check the driver/feature matrix before going out and buying a<br>Promise TX4 (EUR 80,00) like I did; the hardware supports all the nice stuff
<br>but the driver doesn't.<br><br>It seems that hardware implementing the AHCI specs are best supported by<br>libata but I don't know of any controller cards you can purchase separately.<br>Maybe some mainboards with newer Intel or Nvidia chipsets have such SATA
<br>controllers built in?<br><br>The 3ware controllers are probably the best option for the moment as libata<br>certainly needs a few more months before becoming really useful.<br><br>That's just my two cents, though, others probably have more experience with
<br>SATA controllers and related stuff.<br><br>Andreas<br>--<br>Andreas "daff" Ntaflos<br>Vienna, Austria<br><br>GPG Fingerprint: 6234 2E8E 5C81 C6CB E5EC 7E65 397C E2A8 090C A9B4<br><br>_______________________________________________
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