Which Raid controller?

Peripherals, parts, data storage...
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FreeWill
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Which Raid controller?

Post by FreeWill »

I recently got a BP6 with 2 466MHz Celerons, and want to have raid 1 running on the board. Which IDE RAID Controller do you recommend for 2 * 40GB IDE HDD's to be run in raid 1?

I'm probably going to be using Linux on the machine, so if there was one which was available in the UK and Linux compatible that'd be brilliant!

Thanks! :)
hyperspace
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Post by hyperspace »

Welcome to BP6.Com, FreeWill !

I'm no RAID expert but you should be able to find a good RAID PCI controller from newegg or your favorite Internet shop. The BP6 is going on 6 years of age and you probably won't see great performance using a SATA PCI RAID controller. An ATA/66/100/133 PCI RAID controller from company's like Promise should work fine.
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hugoc
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Post by hugoc »

I'd recommend a Promise Fasttrak 66 or 100. See if you can locate a used one. Here's an example.

I got one for about $12 Cdn on Ebay, works great. Recent Linux distros should pick it up just fine on installation. If you need to, there's a guide here on creating a boot floppy for it and installing Linux.
BP6, RU BIOS, 2*Celeron 366@550 1.9v
2*GlobalWin FEP32, 512MB PC100 CAS2
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FreeWill
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Post by FreeWill »

Thanks for the welcome and replies! :)

I'm scouring eBay at this very moment looking for cards, in fact I may have just found a Promise Fasttrak! :D
AMD Athlon XP 1700+ @ 2.85GHz [r507a'd mach 1 cooled] Abit NF7-S | | 2 * 256MB RAM | Radeon 9800SE [Stock] | 30GB WD HDD Soon to have a big swaparound..
loophole
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Post by loophole »

If you wanted to save yourself some money you could try software raid. It works well and is free :D

Check out this HOW-TO:

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Software-RAID-HOWTO.html

Hope that helps,
loophole
Still kicking along with the Abit BP6 :-)
loophole
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Post by loophole »

I also found this article on Linux Software RAID:

http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/tutorials/4349/1

And, Adaptec's white paper on the issue can be found here:

http://graphics.adaptec.com/pdfs/raid_soft_v_hard.pdf

just some more 2cents :D
loophole
Still kicking along with the Abit BP6 :-)
wickie
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Post by wickie »

Don't take Adaptec IDE-RAID controllers. The price is high (i960) but the read performance is really weak (with RAID 0 and 128 MB cache).
But I have not tested RAID 1 - maybe then the performance is ok.
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