SCSI Card

[Robert G. Brown]

On Mon, 8 Sep 2003, [iso-8859-1] José M. Pérez Sánchez wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> Has anyone tested the UW-320 SCSI card Adaptec 29320-R? The strongest
> candidate to be purchased as cluster master node for our cluster comes with
> that card and 10000 RPM Fujitsu hard disks.
> 
> I took a look at the Adaptec page and they say it's not RAID capable on
> linux. Shouldn't be hardware controlled RAID OS independent, as long as
> you have support for the card?

md (software) raid should work on anything, and works remarkably well on
most things.  We use it in large and small scale production and it
performs like a champion.  I've run a system six months in degraded mode
at home (couldn't find time to go get a replacement disk) and still lost
no data.  RH's Kickstart can even kickstart install a ready-to-run md
raid.  As long as the card itself works under linux, building a RAID
should be no problem.

Hardware RAIDs often do require drivers (or that you work the RAID
through a BIOS layer preboot) and leave you at the mercy of the RAID
firmware designers as far as function and recovery are concerned.
Adaptec (after a somewhat rocky start some years ago) has been pretty
good about linux support so I'd guess drivers will be rapidly
forthcoming, unless they are trying to pull the "proprietary" trick with
a binary only driver (a really, really bad idea with something like a
RAID controller).

   rgb

Robert G. Brown	                       http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/
Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305
Durham, N.C. 27708-0305
Phone: 1-919-660-2567  Fax: 919-660-2525     email:rgb at phy.duke.edu



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