I have some experience with the following: 3ware Promise kernel SW raid Promise: I once started with a promise 6000 card and after serious problems with that card I decided to abandon that path. Primarily the card is largely incompatible with the AMD 760 chipset as far as I've been able to conclude. I use dual athlon MP for most customer cluster nodes. Secondarily the serious tech support, while _very_ eager to help are situated in China and, believe it or not, are forbidden to access certain useful websites e.g. the openmosix site. So while we had some very interesting problems trying to smuggle kernel sources back and forth through their bizzaro imposed cencorship I finally got too tired of working with it.
3ware: I've built a 4x120GB raid 5 to serve as main storage for a cluster I built for a customer. It works very nicely. I'm disappointed with the performance, only about 15MB/s. Anyone else got better results? It is well supported in vanilla and openmosix sources. The only problem I've had with this card is that it has dropped single disks twice in 12 months. After replacing and testing I have found nothing wrong with the disks, but I cannot really trust them after being dropped from the raid. Rebuilding is a breeze. Kernel SW raid: One customer wanted a very cheap storage solution for the cluster I built him. So I deployed a 2x120GB raid 1 on kernel SW raid. Very simple setup, very simple management, good general cheap solution. Harebraman Jimmy CSOL research -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list