RAID5 for Linux

[jjohnson at sunrise-linux.com (miah)]

Pretty sure I mentioned 3ware in my post =)  I've been using them since around '01 and have never had a problem with them.  

-miah

On Wed, Apr 28, 2004 at 09:31:31AM -0400, David Backeberg wrote:
> Bob:
> 
> You've already seen everybody else's answers about how many disks you can use. 
> A card I haven't seen mentioned is the 3ware line of raid cards. There's an 
> 8-port SATA card from 3ware called the 8506-8 I've played with using linux 
> software raid. You can have it export all the drives as JBOD and I've found 
> that linux software raid5 running on a dual proc xeon box can run the drives 
> about twice as fast as the controller chipset running raid5 on the card. 
> (115% quicker with some quick hdparm checks)
> 
> BTW, what makes you want SATA? I've never seen anybody do true "hot swap" with 
> SATA drives, but that doesn't mean it's impossible. The swapping I've seen 
> is:
> 1) turn off the system
> 2) pull out the quick-release drive from its bay
> 3) put a different drive into the bay
> 4) turn the system back on
> 
> Which is nicer than opening a chassis and moving cables around, but it's not 
> true hot swap. Has anybody actually hot-plugged a SATA drive under linux? If 
> the scsi bus can handle it, then this should be possible, since at least with 
> the 3ware card with JBOD, the disks show up as scsi devices.
> 
> And how much money are you planning to spend? If you want to rack mount this, 
> there are several chassis that have integrated hot-swappable backplanes.
> 
> And what are you using for cpus/ram, etc? If you're going software raid, its 
> your cpu(s) that are doing the work of running the raid...
> 
> On Tuesday 27 April 2004 17:06, Bob Keyes wrote:
> > At my new job, we have a NAS "Snap Appliance", which is pretty horrible
> > and I want to get rid of it. So I am going to push for a Linux solution.
> > I'd want RAID level 5, and Serial ATA drives, and of course linux
> > niceness. I was looking at the Adaptec 2810SA, but it's got 8 ports..I
> > though you needed 9 for RAID5 (one for each bit plus one parity) or am I
> > misunderstanding this? I'd also want hot-swappable. Anyone have any
> > suggestions?
> >
> > For backup, I am thinking the Sony AIT-2 changer, LIB-D81/A2. Don't know
> > if it's compatible with Bacula though...
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> 
> -- 
> David Backeberg (dave at microway.com)
> Microway Technical Support - http://www.microway.com
> 
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