[KLUG Hardware] SATA RAID controler

[Adam Tauno Williams]

> I'm looking for a SATA RAID controller for my SUSE 9.3 box.
> I bought an Addonics. In the description it stated it supported Linux 
> 2.4 and higher.
> The bummer is the card really only does software RAID controlled by the 
> driver and the driver for this card in Linux doesn't do RAID :(.

Yep, this is like the Adaptec HostRAID crap for SCSI.

> So, I'm looking for a REAL RAID card for my two 80gb SATA drives.
> Any recommendation?

I've used MD (Linux's own software RAID) enough that I trust if
completely.  And unless you've got sky-high I/O loads the performance
difference between MD and low-end-RAID is very negligible.  I use MD on
servers without hesitation,  it has never failed me and is often easier
to manage than wonky off-vendor RAID junk.

IBM makes very nice SCSI RAID cards - the ServeRAID series.  These have
their own battery, RAM, and i960 processor.  And all the administrative
tools actually work.  Everything else is just a sad knock off.

> I'm trying to decide if I really want RAID or if I should use the two 
> drives separately one for data the other for backup. What are your 
> thoughts on this?

If you don't need the redundancy I'd configure them as a striped MD pair
and make the md0 device the physical volume of a volume group.
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