Re: [ukha_d] Re: [OT] UltraATA133PCI RAID Controller - £19.99

[Bruno Prior <bruno@xxxxxxx>]

Scott Ewing wrote:
>>Anyone any idea if it would work in a Linux box?
> 
> Should do, raid is mostly a hardware solution, and you can choose
a
> specific filesystem format for the array at install time :)

Anything this cheap is unlikely to be genuine hardware RAID. The Promise
and Adaptec ATA-RAID cards, for example, are not real hardware RAID - 
most of the work is actually done by the driver which comes with them. 
The fact that the manual says the card requires Windows indicates that 
this is also the case with this card.

If this is based on a Promise RAID controller chipset, then linux should
support it. If not, (or even if so) just use the card as an ATA 
controller to give you extra channels, and use linux software-RAID. 
Unless you have very high CPU utilisation, software-RAID should 
outperform hardware RAID anyway - your CPU is almost certainly more 
powerful than the CPU built into a hardware RAID card.

As for the person who thought they would see a speed improvement using 
ATA-133 over ATA-100 - remember, the controller does not speed up your 
hard disk. ATA-100 provides more than enough bandwidth for most hard 
disks, and often more than enough for two. If you only have one disk per
channel, there is almost certainly no point upgrading to ATA-133. If you
have two disks per channel, you need to see if the combined bandwidth of
the two disks exceeds the bandwidth of the ATA-100 controller. If the 
combined bandwidth at burst speed exceeds it, then you may see a small 
benefit, but it will be negligible. If the combined bandwidth at 
sustained transfer rate exceeds it, then the upgrade would be 
worthwhile. Then again, as I have mentioned before, I would not put two
disks on the same channel in a RAID setup anyway.

Cheers,

Bruno

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