[NCLUG] Back to RAID

[Kirk Rheinlander]

Some info picked up on another list - thought it might be of interest....Kirk
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From: <jeffr at odeon.net>
To: <k12ltsp at riverdale.k12.or.us>
Subject: Re: K12LTSP: Server? Athlon XP 18/1900+ IDE RAID0+1, Iwill XP333
Sender: owner-k12ltsp at riverdale.k12.or.us
Reply-To: k12ltsp at riverdale.k12.or.us


Actually, the 3ware EIDE raid cards are very nice. You can get up to an
8-port card (up to 8 individual ATA-100 EIDE controllers on a single
card). You can do raid 0, 1, 0+1, 5, etc. They support having a
hot-spare and they support hot-swap (if you've got an eide hot-swap drive
canistor, which are suprising inexpensive). The bigest problem is cable
length. Trying to put 8 EIDE drives in a full-tower or server case with
only 18 inch cables is difficult to say the least. You can get 24+ inch
cables, but these are outside of the IDE spec, so YMMV.

Their Escalade 7810 8-port card starts at about $450 on pricewatch.com.

I've got an Escalade 6410 (ATA-66, 4-port card) in one of my servers set
up as a raid 0+1 and have had no problems with it. The Linux kernel 2.4.x
series supports it, and it looks like a SCSI device to the OS.
SCSI is still faster, but for the price, the 3ware escalade cards are hard
to beat.

Jeff