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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