raid card for slackware

J

jcm44

Limp Gawd
Joined
Oct 14, 2001
Messages
454
Can anyone recommend a good RAID card that works in slackware 10.0? I have done some searching around, but this is something I'd rather hear from someone that is actually using the card and confirm that it is working properly.
 
If you don't find a compatible card, you could always use raid support in the kernal. I have a Red Hat 9 box that has 2 drives mirrored via software. Works pretty well. It is capable of all forms of RAID (0,1,5,10...).

They only thing I don't like is that if a drive fails, I don't know about it unless I "cat /proc/mdstat". Also, if you have RAID 5, then all the work for calculating parity is done by the processor, which can have an impact.

The RAID card is a better solution in the long run, but software RAID will get the job done for free.
 
well i think i'd rather go with a raid card. i don't want anything fancy, just mirroring. its not for speed, but just peace of mind.
 
jcm44 said:
well i think i'd rather go with a raid card. i don't want anything fancy, just mirroring. its not for speed, but just peace of mind.
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I'd recommend going with software raid then. I remember hearing that most ide cards couldn't keep up with linux raid anyway, and I could verify this with a promise card I use to have ( I'll see if I can dig up the model # ).

Software raid is perfectly acceptable, especially for raid1. And if you want raid1 for piece of mind, I'd suggest remote backups to, if you can.
They only thing I don't like is that if a drive fails, I don't know about it unless I "cat /proc/mdstat"
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Cron job, a simple grep, and you are gold. I'd set it to run once an hour, that way you know within minutes of a problem happening. I do this at work, and I have it shoot an email to my cell phone in case a drive fails. Very handy.
 
Cron job, a simple grep, and you are gold. I'd set it to run once an hour, that way you know within minutes of a problem happening. I do this at work, and I have it shoot an email to my cell phone in case a drive fails. Very handy.
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Yeah, I figured I could do something like that, just didn't dig in to it.

One thing you want to consider with software RAID 1 on mirrored drives: If a drive fails, the bus usually fails as well. So, you want to make sure your two IDE drives are on seperate IDE busses.
 
XOR != OR said:
I do this at work, and I have it shoot an email to my cell phone in case a drive fails. Very handy.
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That's pretty cool. Well I guess if the software RAID is really that good, there is no use in buying a seperate card. The computer is just a PIII 733 File/Webserver, so the cpu is never really under any load. I kind of wanted a RAID card to get my drives up to ATA100 and off the onboard ATA66, but I am not sure it would make much difference once you go through the PCI bus.

I know the write speed will be slow since it has to write the data to both drives, but will the read speed increase?
 
jcm44 said:
I know the write speed will be slow since it has to write the data to both drives, but will the read speed increase?
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Not in raid 1, but then you won't get that from a hardware card either.

If you want read throughput increased along with data reliability, you'd have to go with raid 5 ( 3 drives ), or raid 0+1 ( 4 drives, strip set mirrored ).
 
i am disappointed i didn't buy the drive that i needed when it was on sale with a bunch of rebates. how difficult is it to set up raid in linux and would it be worth it to buy a ata100 card for the system?
 
How many file sharing clients are we talking here?

Raid setup is fairly easy, as I remember. You just fdisk the partitions, then run the raid tools to create the array ( man pages are your friend ).
 
jcm44 said:
I kind of wanted a RAID card to get my drives up to ATA100 and off the onboard ATA66, but I am not sure it would make much difference once you go through the PCI bus.
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For a file server, this won't make much of a difference as the bottleneck becomes the network. (running 10/100)
 
well its just my home server, i am on it on a daily basis, so you could say there is only one real client, me. but i have about 4 other computers connected to it and they are all doing something. either playing mp3's, copying files, etc etc. i will look into software raid some more and wait for my hard drive match to go on sale again. surely there will be some decent labor day sales...

For a file server, this won't make much of a difference as the bottleneck becomes the network. (running 10/100)
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I figured.
 
The disks don't even have to be the same. The system that I'm running it on has one ~9.2gb drive and one ~10.xgb drive. So, the extra space on the larger drive could petentially be wasted. But, if you have say a 40gb drive and a 60gb drive, you could mirror 40gb, then have the other 20gb extra from the larger drive as a seperate partition. Software RAID is pretty flexible.
 
Ok, well, techincally, they don't even have to be disks, so much as block devices.

It's entirely possible to make two files on a disk and raid them. Although what the point would be is beyond me. Maybe encryption? *shrug*
 
raid1 will sometimes allow more than one request to be serviced at once using the different read heads at different places, so you effectively halve the latency on requests.

oh, and raiding two files is entirely possible and completely impractical.
 
just to keep things consistant is my main reason for wanting the exact same drive. now if only my printer had better linux support.....
 
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