<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><br><div><div>On Mar 15, 2008, at 12:47 PM, John Welch wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite">Just wanted to add some perspective from my own personal experience, not with this particular card, but with the company who makes these cards, HighPoint. First, I have to qualify my comments by saying that this was several years ago and it was with what was probably the lowest card on their food chain. Having said that, my experience with them was horrible. I was just looking for a PCI card so that I could add some more ATA hard drives to my system. I chose the HighPoint card because it was reasonably priced and they <i>seemed to be </i>Linux friendly. However, I came to find out that their Linux support only included a small number of distros. I still thought I was OK because RedHat was one of the supported distros, but as someone pointed out in a previous post, they only supported specific kernels within the supported distros, and did not seem good at keeping things up to date. The card <i>kind of</i> worked with the standard, up to date, RedHat kernel that I was using at the time, but I had issues with the card not recognizing the full capacity of one of my drives, and I also had some problems with the system locking up. I tried contacting support via email, and although they did respond, they were not very helpful. I have to admit I never tried calling their support line. I simply gave up, and found another, cheaper card from NewEgg; which although it didn't specifically say that Linux was supported, worked out of the box, with the stock kernel.<br></blockquote></div><br><div>I'll qualify this by saying my only experience with hardware RAID cards is with SCSI units, not SATA, but I don't see where it would make any difference.</div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div>As I understand it, and in my experience, a hardware RAID card shouldn't care about what OS it's running on, or what kernel, or anything else.</div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div>The card should have its own BIOS, including a built-in program for creating and testing arrays. It should appear to the OS as a single drive, of the type it supports, or possible multiple single drives.</div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div>So I can't see how it would make any difference what distro or kernel you are running, it should just appear to be a drive or drives.</div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div>If it DOES matter what kernel or distro you are running than it is not a "hardware" RAID card, and probably has more in common with the 'RAID" support on a lot of mobos, which is just a little memory to store setup parameters with hooks into a (usually Windows) software RAID driver.</div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div>Usually you can tell what you're dealing with by the cost, but the card in question seems high priced enough that it should be a true RAID card.</div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div>beww</div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div></body></html>