[mythtv-users] RocketRAID Cards, was: OT: help selecting drives for server

[Tom]

At 01:04 PM 5/20/2009 -0500, you wrote:
Brian Wood wrote:
On Wednesday 20 May 2009 07:32:00 Jon Bishop wrote:
On May 18, 2009, at 6:18 PM, Nasa wrote:
8-port cards are either PCI-X or PCIExpress for that reason.
It's a HighPoint Technologies, RocketRaid 2320
I believe that with those HighPoint cards, you can use them as
controller cards without using the RAID function. I know it was true
of my RocketRaid IDE raid cards.
Yes, that's what I was doing. It worked, but it could not use the latest 
modes. It was a little strange, Linux saw the drives, but as sde, sdg, sdi 
and sdk, instead of a,b,c,d. Not really a problem, just odd.
There is apparently an open source driver to use the RAID functions of the 
card, I never played with that.
But since I had a 133Mhz. PCI-X slot, I wanted to get a 64-bit card for 
better performance. If you are using 32-bit slots, the RocketRaid is an 
option if you already have one, but I wouldn't buy one specifically for 
Linux, since software RAID works just as well or better with a cheaper card.
Of course the OSS driver may work better than software RAID, but I don't 
know about that. Personally I doubt it, but I have no data to back up that 
opinion.

  It sounds like it is actually a FakeRAID card.  If that is the case you 
are probably better off using the Software RAID functions of Linux.  *In my 
experience*
I would think that the FakeRaid card and the software RAID would come out 
more-or-less even, since the fake raid cards don't offload anything from 
the main cpu.

P.S. I love my 3Ware 8506-4LP 4-port SATA raid card. I want to get another. 
If you use SMART (doesn't everybody??) the SMARTD daemon can look right 
through the 3Ware card and get status on individual drives, using a special 
syntax: "/dev/twe0 -d 3ware,0" (first card, first drive) etc. And it can be 
managed via a web tool from localhost or another machine. Status, 
diagnostics, commands, all accessible. If you don't like cli's.
</soapbox>


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