Need Recommendation for PCI Raid card?

[cayenne]

Hello all,

Someone recently gave me an older compaq box...P4 something or other, about half a GB of ram. I'm wanting to just load it up with large harddrives and use it as a file server. I recently found $99 500GB ATA drives at CompUSA...and bought 4 of them.

I was wanting to play with doing a RAID 5 box with all this...and in the past had read that software raid really didn't cut it, and to use hardware raid.

Can someone recommend a good PCI RAID card that will do RAID 5, and will work with Linux, specifically one that seems to work well with Gentoo? Brand? Options to look for?

Thanks in advance,

cayenne
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Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........

[HymnToLife]

The software RAID is very good, and usually performs better than all but the most expensive hardware RAID solutions. I personnally have three 500 GiB drives in software RAID-5 and am perfectly happy with it, so I suggest you try that first and see if it suits your needs before spending some bucks on a hardware RAID card.

However, since your drive seem to be PATA (and not SATA), this might be a problem, performance-wise...
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Easiest way never leads anywhere...

[cayenne]

[HymnToLife]

Everything you need to setup a software RAID is here :

http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Gentoo_Install_on_Software_RAID

Basically, you just create a FD partition on each one of your drives spanning the whole drive, and then you do

[cayenne]

I thought I'd found a good priced RAID card.... PROMISE FastTrak SX4060

But, one review on newegg.com said that it didn't work with 2.6x kernels.

Can anyone confirm that this card won't work?

If it won't...still looking for recommendations for a hardware raid card...that will do raid5 with 4x IDE harddrives.....

TIA,

cayenne
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Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........

[Cyker]

Eck... RAID5 on IDE is a lesson in pain; Definitely don't do it unless your system has 4 IDE channels, as opposed to the standard two!

Software RAID over PCI also has dubious performance; Under heavy load you can easily saturate the bus with IO traffic and associated crap.

Hardware RAID is fine on PCI - It only sends one stream of data and not 4, and Adaptec SCSI RAID cards I've come across have been very good. But they aren't cheap.

I dunno about IDE RAID controllers; I know SCSI and SATA 'True' hardware RAID controllers are very expensive. There are a lot of cheaper RAID cards, but these are almost always 'accelerated'/fake RAID, which have the worst of both worlds

I had a quick read up on your SX4060, and that looks like a fakeRAID card (It says it uses your CPU, which is usually a good indication it's not 'true' hardware RAID).
However, it could still work as extra IDE ports for software RAID...

TBH 'tho, software RAID's only come into its own on newer systems which don't use the PCI bus as the main bus. PCIe and HyperTransport with SATA allow software RAID to whip most hardware RAID systems without robbing the system of all performance

[barophobia]

[cayenne]