Dead cheap raid 5 card compared to similar others (£50 cheaper). It also allows online capacity upgrades, which basically means you can expand the size of the RAID without destroying the data on the RAID. handy!
The main reason for me getting a RAID 5hardware solution rather than a software solution again, is the fact that even if one of the hard discs on a software RAID5 becomes slightly iffy, it drops it, and you have to rebuild!!! With hardware RAID5, it'll automatically recover, and will rebuild in the background.
This fits into my PCI-33 slot, but can alos connect to a PCI64. mmmm tasty... It has LEDs on the card for RAID access, CRC, and Drive access (4 LEDS) and it has all the necessary connectors for external LEDS too! I nearly creamed myself with the thought of 6 blue LEDS connected externally to the RAID card.
I would recommend upgrading to current firmware and 2.16 storcon utl (both are on www.intel.com. There is a linux version of the 2.16 storcon, but it was hard to find!)
With initial installation on a Gigabyte GA7 motherboard and Adaptec 2940AU SCSI controller, the problems with onboard intel BIOS / adaptec 2940AU and mobo BIOS reared it's ugly head.
I could not for the life of me with all the PCI juggling, IRQ remapping and BIOS remapping options get it to boot with a Adaptec SCSI card and Intel RAID card. I asked a friend about his setup, and he had no problems (he was running a Intel serverboard with his SRCS14L) My problem was solved by removing SCSI from system completely and migrating to IDE bootup drives (which was such a pain on linux!)
Current drivers are 2.05 which are included since the 2.4.19 kernel.
As with all RAID controllers, the manual was bad... very bad! But to compared to others, it's what I expected. I have not bothered to refer to the PDF manual after my first read, as it was not technical enough and did not help with *ANY* RAID BIOS options!
After installation, and setup of the 4 x 160gb SATA drives, the device was immediately recognised as /dev/sda1.
If you are planning to do online capacity upgrades with linux. use the LVM first so it will be easier to resize the array later. I didn't bother as I would be replacing all this in a couple of years for something bigger.
I am running it with a linux raid partition and reiserfs. ReiserFS has preformed pretty well, through hard disc crashes. But as usual.. I would recommend backups to DLT or another offline NAS
General performance is good, tho software raid did give me 20k KB/s rebuild, where as this gave me ~11k KB/s, where 4 x 160gb took just under 2hrs to rebuild. So reading data off it comfortably saturates 100mb ethernet, which I why I upgraded to 1000mb.
Does not come with SATA cables, so buy them as well!!
How helpful would this review be to a person making a buying decision? Rating guidelines
very helpful by (89%):
helpful by (11%):
