Vlad's Hopefully Definitive Guide to Linux RAID

[Vlad]

Edited January 9, 2010 by Vlad

[Xahid]

Great, Nice, very informative !

Good work, keep it up :)

[rson451]

Very nice writeup. If there are no objections, I see this being sticky'd in the not so distant future.

[markwolfe Veteran]

(Y) I like!

I know only the bare minimal about RAID on Linux, having only set up one dmraid config in my entire Linux history. :blush:

[Mouldy Punk]

Nice description, but I'm confused when you say hardware raids are expensive. How would you classify something like this? I'd assume it's hardware raid, but for that price (and considering its size), I wouldn't say it has dedicated processor or RAM. Is it like on-board RAID, but that you can plug in to any motherboard? (if yours hasn't got onboard RAID for example).

Reason why I ask is, I'm considering the RAID route, and I'd rather do hardware RAID, which I thought would be rather expensive until I stumbled on that card, along with other similar cards.

[Budious]

How would you classify something like this?

It's fakeraid moved from motherboard to a daughter card, PCI in this case. True hardware raid would require more than standard PCI bus to utilize the throughput, PCI-E or PCI-X.

This on the other hand, would be an example of true hardware raid on a PCI-E card.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16816116044

[Vlad]

Much apologies for not following up on this post, but thank you everyone for your kind replies! My new job has me extra busy, what with the economy being what it is...(although it admittedly hasn't stopped me from complaining about it in my blog).

Anyways, as Budious said, Mouldy Punk, the chipset used by those cheap PCI (and now PCIe) cards is simply off-the-shelf motherboard chips on PCI daughterboard. And Budious has correctly identified that TRUE hardware RAID will be PCIe or PCI-X based (although there are some legacy exceptions - for example, I own one an Adaptec 2400A ATA RAID controller).

The rule of thumb when it comes to hardware RAID is you get what you pay for.