Raid-1

>
>
>I haven't actually played with either yet, but in the Linux world, the
>3Ware controller is held in high regard. Both parallel and serial
>versions are available from 2 to 12 drives. They have had open source
>drivers in the mainstream kernel since 2.2. I think Steven has used
>these.
>
I have a 3ware 7506-8. Its an 8 channel IDE raid card. Not much to say
about it, it was pretty easy to setup, and just runs. The only trouble
I had with it, it took awhile for me to figure out this was the
problem, is that the scsi modules weren't loading soon enough during
boot up; the 3ware driver was already in the initrd. Everything but
root in on a LVM on the 3ware, so the partitions (/var, /usr, ...)
could never be found if the scsi modules weren't loaded before the LVM
started. I moved the scsi modules into the initrd, so now LVM can load
the partitions at the start of the boot process, and everything is fine.

The only other issue that can arise if you are upgrading something; you
have to ensure that the card's firmware, the module, and the userspace
utilties are all of the same version for anything to work. For awhile I
had the wrong version of the userspace utility and couldn't query the
controller's status.

All my other raid experience is on crappy little low end nothing cards.

-- 
Steven Kurylo