Re: How I built a 2.8TB RAID storage array

From: Eric Gisin (ericgisin_at_hotmail.com)
Date: 02/20/05 

Date: Sun, 20 Feb 2005 13:26:00 -0800

"Yeechang Lee" <ylee@pobox.com> wrote in message
news:slrnd1g04a.5mt.ylee@pobox.com...
>
> CONTROLLER CARDS
> Initial: Two Highpoint RocketRAID 454 cards.
> Actual: Two 3Ware 7506-4LP cards.
> Why: I needed PATA cards to go with my PATA drives, and also wanted to
> put the two PCI-X slots on my motherboard to use. I found exactly two
> PATA PCI-X controller cards: The 3Ware, and the Acard AEC-6897. Given
> that the Acard's Linux driver compatibility looked really, really
> iffy, I went with the 3Ware. I briefly considered the 7506-8 model,
> which would've saved me about $120, but figured I'd be better off
> distributing the bandwidth over two PCI-X slots rather than one.
>
No, one PCI-X card would be just as good.

You don't mention the ethernet card, which could also be PCI-X.
>
> SOFTWARE
> Initial: Linux software RAID 5 and XFS or JFS.
> Actual: Linux software RAID 5 and JFS.
> Why: Initially I planned on software RAID knowing that the Highpoint
> (and the equivalent Promise and Adaptec cards) didn't do true hardware
> RAID. Even after switching over to 3Ware (which *does* do true
> hardware RAID), everything I saw and read convinced me that software
> RAID was still the way to go for performance, long-term compatibility,
> and even 400GB extra space (given I'd be building one large RAID 5
> array instead of two smaller ones).
>
Is there a comparison of Linux RAID 5 to top-end RAID cards? I suspect 3Ware is
better.

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