Linux Raid cards?

[Healy]

My current 250gb raid mirror for all my MP3s is running on my windows
box. I'd like to move it over to linux if I can and build a dedicated
server for my squeezebox and home audio.

Anyone have a recomendation for an IDE raid card that will work good
with linux 2.4 kernel? It must do mirroring. My current card will only
do striping but no mirroring in the 2.4 kernel (debian stable). Hence
the reason it's in a windows box. I'd like to keep it under a hundred
bucks if I can.

Thanks,

-Healy

[Jeff Blasius]

As far as I understand, ide raid cards do not play well with linux.
Especially if they're
on the motherboard. I know several people who have both raid 1 and 0
setup in linux
through software and love it. I've heard dozens of reports, and I'd
venture to say that software
raid in linux is more stable than hardware raid in windows. Here is a
decent tutorial for debian
http://members.ferrara.linux.it/calicant/docs/debianraid/debian_raid1.html
I would also search the gentoo forums for helpful tips even if you're
not running gentoo.
Good Luck,
jeff


Healy wrote:

>My current 250gb raid mirror for all my MP3s is running on my windows
>box. I'd like to move it over to linux if I can and build a dedicated
>server for my squeezebox and home audio.
>
>Anyone have a recomendation for an IDE raid card that will work good
>with linux 2.4 kernel? It must do mirroring. My current card will only
>do striping but no mirroring in the 2.4 kernel (debian stable). Hence
>the reason it's in a windows box. I'd like to keep it under a hundred
>bucks if I can.
>
>Thanks,
>
>-Healy
>
>
>
>

[Dan Sully]

* Healy <slim (AT) nwgeeks (DOT) com> shaped the electrons to say...

>My current 250gb raid mirror for all my MP3s is running on my windows
>box. I'd like to move it over to linux if I can and build a dedicated
>server for my squeezebox and home audio.
>
>Anyone have a recomendation for an IDE raid card that will work good
>with linux 2.4 kernel? It must do mirroring. My current card will only
>do striping but no mirroring in the 2.4 kernel (debian stable). Hence
>the reason it's in a windows box. I'd like to keep it under a hundred
>bucks if I can.

The 3Ware and HighPoint are the best supported cards under Linux. In that order.

-D
--
You have the puzzle pieces? Good, then turn off the damn walls.

[Mark Komarinski]

On Thu, Apr 29, 2004 at 06:55:16PM -0700, Healy wrote:
> My current 250gb raid mirror for all my MP3s is running on my windows
> box. I'd like to move it over to linux if I can and build a dedicated
> server for my squeezebox and home audio.
>
> Anyone have a recomendation for an IDE raid card that will work good
> with linux 2.4 kernel? It must do mirroring. My current card will only
> do striping but no mirroring in the 2.4 kernel (debian stable). Hence
> the reason it's in a windows box. I'd like to keep it under a hundred
> bucks if I can.

I forget what 2.4 kernel is being shipped by debian stable, but you
may want to get the latest 2.4 release. What card do you have now
that only does striping? That's real strange.

The 3Ware cards have pretty good support under Linux for mirror and striping.
They're a bit over $100, but CDW has their low end card for $129.

-Mark

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[Stephen Ryan]

On Thu, 2004-04-29 at 21:55, Healy wrote:
> My current 250gb raid mirror for all my MP3s is running on my windows
> box. I'd like to move it over to linux if I can and build a dedicated
> server for my squeezebox and home audio.
>
> Anyone have a recomendation for an IDE raid card that will work good
> with linux 2.4 kernel? It must do mirroring. My current card will only
> do striping but no mirroring in the 2.4 kernel (debian stable). Hence
> the reason it's in a windows box. I'd like to keep it under a hundred
> bucks if I can.

Is there some reason why it has to be hardware? The 2.4 kernel has a
decent software raid driver (at least, I really hope it's decent,
because I've been running it on all the servers at work for a couple of
years now :-)
--
Stephen Ryan
Digital Rights Management is bad for all of us:
http://www.bricklin.com/robfuture.htm

[Healy]

On Fri, 2004-04-30 at 06:19, Mark Komarinski wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 29, 2004 at 06:55:16PM -0700, Healy wrote:
> > My current 250gb raid mirror for all my MP3s is running on my windows
> > box. I'd like to move it over to linux if I can and build a dedicated
> > server for my squeezebox and home audio.
> >
> > Anyone have a recomendation for an IDE raid card that will work good
> > with linux 2.4 kernel? It must do mirroring. My current card will only
> > do striping but no mirroring in the 2.4 kernel (debian stable). Hence
> > the reason it's in a windows box. I'd like to keep it under a hundred
> > bucks if I can.
>
> I forget what 2.4 kernel is being shipped by debian stable, but you
> may want to get the latest 2.4 release. What card do you have now
> that only does striping? That's real strange.
>

The Rocket-Raid 100:
http://www.highpoint-tech.com/USA/rr100.htm

I must admit, I haven't looked for a while to see if it's now
supported. When I built the box striping was the only thing available
in the stock debian woody kernel.

> The 3Ware cards have pretty good support under Linux for mirror and striping.
> They're a bit over $100, but CDW has their low end card for $129.
>
> -Mark
>
>

[David Yaffe]

If you can break the $100 barrier the Adaptec ATA RAID cards work extremely well. They appear as SCSI Raid controllers to Linux. I'm using the 2400A card under Linux with no problem (0/1) with 4 x 100 GB drives.
David


----- Original Message -----
From: "Dan Sully" <daniel (AT) electricrain (DOT) com>
To: "Slim Devices Discussion" <discuss (AT) lists (DOT) slimdevices.com>
Sent: Thursday, April 29, 2004 9:48 PM
Subject: [slim] Linux Raid cards?


> * Healy <slim (AT) nwgeeks (DOT) com> shaped the electrons to say...
>
> >My current 250gb raid mirror for all my MP3s is running on my windows
> >box. I'd like to move it over to linux if I can and build a dedicated
> >server for my squeezebox and home audio.
> >
> >Anyone have a recomendation for an IDE raid card that will work good
> >with linux 2.4 kernel? It must do mirroring. My current card will only
> >do striping but no mirroring in the 2.4 kernel (debian stable). Hence
> >the reason it's in a windows box. I'd like to keep it under a hundred
> >bucks if I can.
>
> The 3Ware and HighPoint are the best supported cards under Linux. In that order.
>
> -D
> --
> You have the puzzle pieces? Good, then turn off the damn walls.
>

[bob villielm]

Mark Komarinski wrote:
> I forget what 2.4 kernel is being shipped by debian stable, but you
> may want to get the latest 2.4 release. What card do you have now
> that only does striping? That's real strange.
>
> The 3Ware cards have pretty good support under Linux for mirror and striping.
> They're a bit over $100, but CDW has their low end card for $129.

I'll third the 3ware recommendation.

You can pick up the 7006-2 card for about $110.
Just built a mirrored Mandrake 9.2 box with one
last month, performance and stability are great.
Installation was an absolute breeze.

-bob

[Gregory P. Smith]

> The 3Ware and HighPoint are the best supported cards under Linux. In that
> order.

The 3Ware cards are great. Its well worth noting however that they are
best used as simply a multi-channel ide or sata controller if you want to
do raid5 (i have no data on their hardware raid1 or raid0 performance;
presumably they do alright there). Their onboard raid5 speed is very
slow (30-40mbyte/sec max); using linux software raid on disks attached
to a 3ware uses neglegible cpu and gets you much higher IO speed.

-g

[Daryle A. Tilroe]

bob villielm wrote:
> Mark Komarinski wrote:
>>
>> The 3Ware cards have pretty good support under Linux for mirror and
>> striping.
>
> I'll third the 3ware recommendation.
>

I can fourth it! :-) While I use XP for my home 'server' I run
a ~100 user email/imap/webmail server using linux and a 3ware card
with 1+0 mirroring then striping of 4 ide drives. Was inexpensive
and has worked great for almost 3 years now. Had a drive fail and
it was completely painless to replace and remirror.

--
Daryle A. Tilroe

[Lars Kellogg-Stedman]

[Warning: really, really, off topic.]

> example, the 3rd drive on a IDE chain is always /dev/hdc. But in SCSI, if
> you
> have drives A, B, and C on SCSI IDs 0,3,4.. that's /dev/sda, sdb, sdc. Ok,
> now
> drive B dies. Does /dev/sdb just go away? No! the C drive becomes /dev/sdb
> after reboot (slides down). That's pretty evil stuff.

Fortunately, you can ignore this particular problem through the use of
logical volume management, which assigns a unique ID to each disk (this
is a simplification) and then scans for them at boot time, making actual
device names irrelevant.

I highly recommend LVM, especially if you're going to be creating a
large array -- it's tremendously convenient to be able to flexibly
create and grow chunks of storage.

ext2 and ext3 allow you to label a filesystem, and there is kernel
support (possibly requiring a patch) that allows you to then mount
filesystem by label ('mount LABEL=root /'). This option unfortunately
does not work with swap partitions.

> DON'T get a Promise or Highpoint RAID card. Repeat.. DON'T.

Well, not for use as hardware RAID cards in any case. On the other
hand, if you ignore the 'RAID' support on the card, they (or at least
the Promise cards, I've never used one from Highpoint) make fine SATA
and PATA controllers for a software RAID system.

I have a small 4-disk SATA array at home (using the excellent hot-swap
chassis from Supermicro
<URL:http://www.supermicro.com/products/accessories/mobilerack/CSE-M35T-1
..cfm>). I'm using a Promise SATA 150 TX4, which is a 4-port SATA card;
there are drivers (sata_promise) in the latest 2.6 kernels; I don't know
about 2.4 support.

The array is configured as a software RAID5 volume, which is then used
as a single LVM PV (well, there's also a RAID1 boot volume, since GRUB
doesn't know how to boot from RAID5 volumes).

-- Lars

[dean]

On May 6, 2004, at 5:32 AM, Lars Kellogg-Stedman wrote:
>> DON'T get a Promise or Highpoint RAID card. Repeat.. DON'T.
>
> Well, not for use as hardware RAID cards in any case. On the other
> hand, if you ignore the 'RAID' support on the card, they (or at least
> the Promise cards, I've never used one from Highpoint) make fine SATA
> and PATA controllers for a software RAID system.
>
> I have a small 4-disk SATA array at home (using the excellent hot-swap
> chassis from Supermicro
> <URL:http://www.supermicro.com/products/accessories/mobilerack/CSE-
> M35T-1
> .cfm>). I'm using a Promise SATA 150 TX4, which is a 4-port SATA card;
> there are drivers (sata_promise) in the latest 2.6 kernels; I don't
> know
> about 2.4 support.

My experience with the Promise card was terrible.

I bought one of these cards and found that the Linux drivers that
Provided provided didn't support the new rev of the card that I got.
Promise's headquarters must be very far away, since requests to their
e-mail support staff take about three weeks roundtrip, and contain
information that's on their website not the answers to questions you
ask. After too many hours of messing around I had to throw it into the
electronics compost pile in my basement.

Beware.

-dean

[Lars Kellogg-Stedman]

> My experience with the Promise card was terrible.
>
> I bought one of these cards and found that the Linux drivers that
> Provided provided

That was your problem :).

The kernel (2.6, at least) has native support for these cards. The
drivers from promise attempt to support the "RAID" the cards claim to
provide. Don't use them. Use the kernel drivers -- I've been using
various Promise cards for years, and I've never had a single problem.

Again, the trick is to treat them as dumb controllers, not as RAID cards.

I think *all* of the low-end, multiport RAID cards are going to have
similar issues (half-arsed 'software' RAID implementations that require
special driver support, with either no drivers or buggy drivers provided
by the manufacturer).

By all means, if you can afford a 3ware (or maybe an Adaptec or LSI)
card, that's going to be the best choice.

-- Lars

[dean]

I was simply trying to use them as dumb controllers. I did know that
2.6 had support, but I wasn't willing to take the time to upgrade my
kernel.

Next time I need to build another system, I'll give it another shot
with a 2.6 kernel and see how it goes...

On May 6, 2004, at 10:03 AM, Lars Kellogg-Stedman wrote:

>> My experience with the Promise card was terrible.
>>
>> I bought one of these cards and found that the Linux drivers that
>> Provided provided
>
> That was your problem :).
>
> The kernel (2.6, at least) has native support for these cards. The
> drivers from promise attempt to support the "RAID" the cards claim to
> provide. Don't use them. Use the kernel drivers -- I've been using
> various Promise cards for years, and I've never had a single problem.
>
> Again, the trick is to treat them as dumb controllers, not as RAID
> cards.
>
> I think *all* of the low-end, multiport RAID cards are going to have
> similar issues (half-arsed 'software' RAID implementations that require
> special driver support, with either no drivers or buggy drivers
> provided
> by the manufacturer).
>
> By all means, if you can afford a 3ware (or maybe an Adaptec or LSI)
> card, that's going to be the best choice.
>
> -- Lars
>
>

[Jack Coates]

On Thu, 2004-05-06 at 09:49, dean blackketter wrote:
....
> My experience with the Promise card was terrible.
>
> I bought one of these cards and found that the Linux drivers that
> Provided provided didn't support the new rev of the card that I got.
> Promise's headquarters must be very far away, since requests to their
> e-mail support staff take about three weeks roundtrip, and contain
> information that's on their website not the answers to questions you
> ask. After too many hours of messing around I had to throw it into the
> electronics compost pile in my basement.
>
> Beware.
>
> -dean

and when I finally did downgrade the OS to their recommended level, get
the driver loaded and build the array, the logs were filled with driver
spew and the performance was down around Zip disk levels. I tried
contacting support at that point, never heard back, and handed it over
to a windows user.
--
Jack at Monkeynoodle Dot Org: It's A Scientific Venture...
************************************************** ********************
*"And it's lend me ten pounds, I'll buy you a drink, and mother wake *
*me early in the morning!" *
*-- Boys From County Hell from Red Roses For Me by The Pogues *
************************************************** ********************

[David Ranch]

>Again, the trick is to treat them as dumb controllers, not as RAID cards.

If you're going to use them as dumb cards, just buy their Non-RAID cards. Much
cheaper.

--DAvid
..----------------------------------------------------------------------------.
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