hello all!

I am looking for some hardware IDE RAID recommendations, cost is sort of a factor here.

I've came across the Arco hot swap DupliDisk drive..but I havent seem to find much information on it.

Anybody care to share their setups?

3ware rocks!

Ditto for 3ware

what specific cards?

I think i want to stick to RAID 1 (mirroring)

3ware has two 2-port cards which support RAID1

7006-2 is their ATA card
8006-2 is their SATA card

- Mike

I use Promise SX 4000 and 6000 cards

Promise should be okay for just a mirror. For my own work, though, 3ware all the way.

I like 3ware as well but surprised no one has mentioned Adaptec. They also make a few inexpensive raid cards that work quite well for my needs.

3Ware pretty much invented IDE RAID hardware controllers. Before them, Adaptec only offered SCSI and probably has only reluctantly entered the IDE market in response to 3Ware's growth.

I assume most customer like 3Ware (ourselves included) because it is a true controller and not just a hardware XOR chip that still relies on the host cpu/BIOS to do most of the heavy lifting.

3Ware! :gthumb:

We use their 4-port IDE RAID controller (an older version of the 7500-4) on our MySQL database server and it works great. Pay the extra money; it's worth it.

Nothing but 3ware for IDE raids in a server. I've got several in use, up to 1.5TB arrays. I wouldn't touch anything else in a mission critical server.

Actually, the Adaptec cards the 1200 and 2400) are HighPoint controllers so aren't true hardware.

I wouldn't trust my children with anything but 3ware.

Yep, for IDE it just has to be 3Ware all the way, we've just got a few of the new SATA cards, they fly along nicely, especially with dual channel ddr.

ok, looks like 3ware is worth looking into.

a few questions. Im just going to get the 7006-2 cards for IDE RAID 1 (mirroring)

since user data will be on a network storage array, this will be only used for the OS (redhat).

is this array bootable?

Also, if a drive fails, does the card automatically populates the new drive?

Originally posted by human39
ok, looks like 3ware is worth looking into.

a few questions. Im just going to get the 7006-2 cards for IDE RAID 1 (mirroring)

since user data will be on a network storage array, this will be only used for the OS (redhat).

is this array bootable?

Also, if a drive fails, does the card automatically populates the new drive?


The arrays are bootable on pretty much all modern biosen - I've never had a problem with that

I beleive you can specify a spare drive to be built if 1 drive fails, however in the 7006-2 I dont think you can do that because it can only connect 2 drives.

When 1 drive fails, you will get an email warning, the bad drive will be taken off line and the server will operate off the one harddrive. Since the 3ware card is hot-swappable you can remove the bad hd and put in a new one, rebuild the new drive automatically and you can do all this with no downtime! (assuming your case has hot swappable drive bays)

Sorry for the thread hijack. :eek:

I've been looking for the same thing (true hardware IDE RAID) and I ran across the 3ware Escalade 7506-8 controller. Any thoughts on this controller?

Ok, back to the scheduled program... :D

You really can't go wrong with 3Ware, I've nothing against any of their cards we've used, always seem to work (Although we did have one that stopped working in RAID5 and only worked in RAID1, but that was some time ago now).

is the 3ware transparent to the system, or do special drivers need to be installed?

It appears like any SCSI card with a huge drive (or drives) attached. DOS/Windows can use the BIOS functions if you boot from it. To use it in Linux, FreeBSD, or get much out of it in Windows, you will need the readily-available and well-supported drivers.

But that's true for anything past generic IDE and SVGA.

I have a related question for the 3Ware experts --

Are there are any plans for 3Ware to write a native "storage driver" for the board?

I'm referring to the new storage architecture in Windows 2003 server that allows the MMC Disk Management utility to "see" 3rd party RAID hardware directly and manage it the same as built-in regular hard drives.

The MMC/DiskMgr is a good utility (it's actually a stripped-down version of the Veritas storage/volume manager) and it would be nice to use the "native" utilities instead of the vendor-specific ones.