[Sussex] Lots of IDE drives...

[Paul Tansom]

Mark Harrison (Groups) wrote:
> On Mon, 2005-09-19 at 22:14 +0100, Martin Easton wrote:
> 
>>As far as I have seen with a desktop PC, the best manufacturer for
>>RAID
>>cards is "PROMISE". Have a look and see what you can find. I am new to
>>Linux
>>so have no idea what it can understand. I suspect almost anything!
> 
> Promise got a good reputation about 2 years ago when the competition at
> the low end of the market was basically "Promise vs. Highpoint OEM." 
> 
> At the time, Highpoint produced the chipsets that every man and his dog
> used in their "own brand value RAID" cards, which quickly acquired a
> reputation for losing data left right and centre.

Which I guess could be born out by my experience. With my first cards I
bought a couple of Epox cards (really can't remember what chipset they
were) and had no end of problems even before even getting near Linux.
These were returned. I replaced them with some Highpoint based cards
from Abit which not only proved to be cheaper but came with two 80 wire
cables (at the time my other supplier was charging £15 for these, so
just buying two cables was dearer than the card!). These cards were, and
still are going strong. I've only upgraded them to support the larger
drives, and this will allow me to filter them on to my lower spec
servers and have one drive per channel :)

> AIUI, the problems widely reported at the time proved to be with the
> Windows drivers, not the underlying hardware.

When used in the Windows box I didn't have any problems with the drivers
I used. Initially the Abit ones, and later direct from the Highpoint
website. I guess Abit are a step up from many of the generic
manufacturers! I found Highpoint themselves very helpful when I emailed
 their tech support.

> Insert parable about why OpenSource drivers are basically a phenomenally
> good idea here! :-)

Only with suitable support from the hardware vendor sadly. I've never
had any problems throwing Linux onto a motherboard, but from my
experience with the ITE chipset, which is being used on a number of
motherboards with 'RAID' support I'm becoming more wary! Oddly you can
get Linux drivers direct from the ITE website, so arguably they aren't a
good example of poor support - try the wireless chipsets perhaps :)

-- 
Paul Tansom | Aptanet Ltd. | http://www.aptanet.com/