[TriLUG] IDE RAID

[Jay Barrett]

Justin,

I have been using using an 3Ware Escalade 7500 IDE RAID
controller with RH 7.3 for the past 5 months with no issues.
My NAS is configured with as a 5 drive RAID 5 array with a hot 
spare.  I went with 3Ware's the 8 drive parallel ATA version but 
also they have 4 and 2 drive versions.  The card was easy to 
configure and has been painless since then.  I must warn you that 
routing the cables was a pain and I ended up using the round single
connection cables.  I really wanted to get the serial ATA version to
avoid the cabling issues and the potential of the cables to impact
the airflow and thus cause thermal problems which would lead to a
premature failure. At that time serial ATA drives were difficult to get 
and limited to 80GB, but the next one I buy will be serial ATA. 

By the way my decision to use the 3Ware card drove my choices
on Motherboards (Tyan dual Xeon) and drives (IBM 185GB) in order
to stay within their (3ware) compatibility matrix.  And the motherboard
drove the rack mount chassis decision, which could not be sourced
locally.  Anyways after a little detective work all came together
nicely and I would definitely buy another 3Ware controller. 

Small Print: My primary complaint about IDE RAID cards is that nobody
locally (RTP area) carries anything other than 2 port cards, but a few
will special order them for you, but that kind of defeats the purpose
in my mind.

Regards,
Jay

Jay at Skyboxx.com



From: trilug-admin at trilug.org [mailto:trilug-admin at trilug.org] On Behalf
Of Justin Johnson
Sent: Saturday, May 17, 2003 3:38 PM
To: TriLUG
Subject: [TriLUG] Installing linux on IDE RAID

Any one here installed linux(RedHat) on a system with IDE raid? I have
asystem with a Promise Fastrax TX2000 controller and space available, so
I
was considering diving in and installing RH 9 on it. Any thing to watch
out
for, or is  it pretty straight forward. I know that ther are drivers
avaialble, off to get the most current one now.

TIA,
Justin