[LUNI] Raid Card for sarge

[Kevin Hill]

Michael Scott wrote:

>I too am working on a big-old server for music/video etc.  I solicited opinions
>from a couple of lists as to what recommendations folks had.  It was almost
>unanimous opinion that Adaptec cards were crap and to go with the 3Ware Escalade.
>
>That's the one I ended up buying.  It supports Linux and (to a lesser extent
>BSD, you have to compile the drivers yourself), and appears to the system as a
>SCSI drive.  It supports RAID 0, 1, 1+0, 5, JBOD in hardware.  It will also
>support hotspares and automatic array rebuild.
>
>I'm building mine using SATA drives as the cables are much easier to deal with
>and they are faster.
>
>I'm still collecting hardware as my budget allows, so I haven't actually built
>the server yet.
>  
>
Just as another data point about 2-3 years ago I built a 150Gb nfs 
server using a pentium II 400, 4 60Gb el cheapo Global saturday morning 
special drives using software raid 5, and I've had no problems with the 
performance. It is in fact faster than any single-drive IDE system I've 
played with.. Even survived one dead drive so far, so depending on your 
app, and the value of your data, you might not want to worry too much 
about hardware costs... The only thing to watch for is you'll need to 
find a script to check for drive failures periodically...

-kevin