md RAID5 and drive cabling questions

[groovin]

hey all, how much of a performance hit would i see if i had a 4 drive RAID5 array on 2 IDE channels, that is, 2 drives per cable? If it's too noticeable, then I think I'll a controller card. thanks

[linuxtuxhellsinki]

[hesperaux]

Hey man, I think I can help you out considering I just did the exact same thing and wasted a WEEK of my time on it. First of all, DO NOT use an ata/raid card, man. If you do, then make sure you buy a very good one. Remember, you get what you pay for. In my case, I paid for a SIL680-based card, 30USD. Bad choice! I got a plethora of wonderful DMA, CRC, and IDE reset errors, and I couldn't even install gentoo onot the array. What I ended up having to do, was put three drives onto the motherboard with my cdrom (the livecd wouldn't load right on the cdrom, but I found out later you need to pass -usescsci and -useraid to the kernel boot prompt). So I suggest getting a good ata card (my sil680 said that it supported all that I needed, but it couldn't handle it four times at once), and use the card for your other devices. Put the array on your motherboard.

Good luck,

David

If you have any questions feel free to email me. ( hesperaux@gmail.com )
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[groovin]

thanks for the replies,

a friend of mine just gave me a promise hd controller card, i cant recall the chipset. he said it works great, but thats under windows. i guess ill give it a try.

[Marlo]

Hi,
Promise is very good under windows. But with linux? Throw it away!
Use raidtoos or mdadm for raid 5. It's a softraid but very fast and secure.

Ma
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[groovin]

yeah i know these cheapy raid cards suck under linux, but i was going to just use it as an HD controller, not any of the HD raid features.