Anybody have any experience and suggestions on where to get IDE RAID servers decent enough for a webserver? (Please no SCSI vs IDE arguments!)
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Anybody have any experience and suggestions on where to get IDE RAID servers decent enough for a webserver? (Please no SCSI vs IDE arguments!)
Are you asking about raid cards /motherboard or whole systems.
We've built a few raid systems with Tyan LE-T with raid - the hardware raid isnt great. I dont like it :) - I just hook up both hd's to the normal ide bus and use software raid which is just as good :) - you can look up on the net stuff about the Promise chip that Tyan uses for raid - it doesnt sit very well with linux
yes i have done ide software raids too and they work pretty well.
I wouldn't go with the software RAID nor the Promise controllers if you want something "decent". They both have serious shortcomings - for example:
* When a disk crashes, it takes loooong time to rebuild the array. With all the Promise controllers I have known, the server will _not_ be online while rebuilding the array
* Software RAID uses a lot of CPU resources (compared to "real" hardware RAID)
* No hotswap
I would suggest using the Adaptec 2400A RAID controller for IDE RAID.
yeah, i have a promise sx6000 on one of my machines, and probalby one out of 10 reboots, it finds inconsistencies in the drive, and has to rebuild the journal and fchk the drive.
I was recently testing out a IDE raid server, which uses the Promise raid. The server was running smp with dual p3 1.13 512k processors and 4 drives of 40 GB 7200 under raid 0 mode (stripe).
Currently the test server has been used for artificial load tests and has been up and running for 2 weeks.
In Redhat 7.2, ther arent really drivers for it but you may be able to find a promise raid driver for 7.2. I am not too sure if Promise finally released one yet. I modified one.
Pretty much ide raid emulates scsi raid, and the Promise Raid Driver is actually a fake scsi raid driver. Dont expect super high results, but do watch out for CPU load. Since this is a fake scsi emulation, the CPU load will be quite high. From tests the loads are a bit higher than normal scsi raid.
To install the ide raid drivers for Promise on a redhat 7.2 you have to be damn sure that you know how to create and edit the bootups and initrd.img and initrdsmp.img files. And especially making sure the ft.o file for the promise fasttrack is resident on the server. The last thing to make sure is that you edit the lilo.conf file to include the smp bootup if you are running dualies.
Also, the Promise Fastrack raid seems to only work for LILO only.
If any of you guys are attempting to install Promise FT on a Redhat 7.2 and get bummed out, leave me an email at kshen@cephren.ca I maye be able to help.
I second for Adaptec hardware RAID card, as user mentioned some posts above
Try QSOL.COM, just bought a server there, excellent service and a great online configuring tool.
Regards,
Dutchie
I can second (or third) the notion of not using the promise onboard controller. There are limited drivers available (of course not for my distro). As far as rebuild time in a software situation, I haven't experienced too many hardships (dual p3's). The rebuild runs in the background, server still functions (albeit slowly). I have heard good things about Adaptec's solution(s).
Regards,
Jeff
We use Adaptect 2400A and 3Ware 6x00 and 7x00 series cards for IDE RAID, both work without issues.
We like 3Ware's products too :) Never used Adaptec's RAID card, but we have a few of their SCSI raid cards, and the seem to run well.