[olug] Linux friendly SATA RAID controller

[Phil Brutsche]

Dan Linder wrote:
> My current home workstation has three SATA drives using the Linux "MD" 
> RAID5 drivers.  It works quite well, but when I start doing file IO, the 
> system gets sluggish because of the overhead of the RAID5 driver.

Only 3? I've never had any major slowdowns on heavy writes, but I've
always used RAID5 with 4+ drives on dual CPU machines...

> I'm thinking of re-installing and using a true hardware RAID controller 
> (I'm not interested in the quasi RAID controllers that some cards have 
> that still require a software driver).  I have heard people recommend 
> 3Ware, but are there any others that you've had good luck with?

Keep in mind that *any* true hardware RAID card will be expensive - 4
port SATA RAID is ~$300, 8 port SATA RAID is ~$400-500, and then there's
the ~$130 battery module for the controller write cache.

I use the LSI Logic MegaRAID SATA 300-8X RAID card with good results:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816118059

Uses the same drivers and management utilties as the MegaRAID SCSI RAID
cards.

I've heard good things about the Areca RAID controllers, but I haven't
used any of 'em.

If you're going to go 3ware I wouldn't go with anything older than a
9550 series controller - among other things those were the first to
support NCQ.

I tend to avoid Adaptec RAID controllers like the plague. At one point
in time their RAID controllers were decidedly Linux unfriendly
(specifically their 2120S U320 SCSI RAID card and similar vintage SATA
RAID controllers), but I haven't tried anything newer.

-- 

Phil Brutsche
phil at brutsche.us