Ok, right now I have mixed feelings. I got this nice used server, drove to st. louis to get it, about 5 hours both ways. When I got back, something wasent right. At first I though, oh no, it broke while I drove it here. Now I felt horrible then. With some work, searching compaqs site for drivers. This server has 2 cages, I got cage A to work, but never cage B. Long story short, I decided to try and get cage B to work because I can add 2 extra hard drives if I do. This was after I spent 12 hours trouble shooting and getting cage A working. I spent the last 7 hours on this, and you know what it was. The raid card and the adapdect scsi card were incompatible, from what I was told in the FAQ at adaptec, unless I upgraded the software. After seeing COUNTLESS errors on startup, after removing the raid card and the adaptec thing, and plugging the drives into something located on the motherboard(purely guess work) I got this whole thing working. I am really pissed at this raid card. Is it just an extra way to set raid without using the OS? I understand the basics of raid, ie the different levels and what they do. But does anyone use raid cards and have a good experience, or what extra support does it provide. If anyone knows of something it does that is really helpfull could you please post it here. Otherwise the raid card is going in the closet of useless junk :) Thanks

We used a 3ware escalade card in a couple of linux servers. Installed quickly and has given us no trouble yet.

What I want to know is what does it help you accomplish. Thanks

Try this article

http://www.win2000mag.com/Articles/Index.cfm?ArticleID=7108

or if that is not enough

http://www.scsistuff.com/adaptec_aaa131u2.htm

Thanks, that was the type of article I was looking for ;)

Not sure if this could help, but if you're running rh7.0+ with Raid cards, get ready to downgrade your kernel to that of rh6.2. Why? Because the guy that was doing the Linux drivers quit doing so a while ago. I spoke with him via email and basically he said Adaptec has taken over or something like that. However, I don't think they've come up with anything working yet.

That's what happened to my Dell PowerEdge 4500 with 10 hot-swappable drives w/ ami raid. Every time I tried installing rh7 or rh7.1 I got a "no hard drive" error. Only rh6.2 would work.

One downside I just found out to not using a raid card and freebsd is there is not a simple software solution like in RH, I saw some information on it on the board about using software raid with FB. Anyhow all my hopes are lost, I just put one of the 2 raid cards back in...