SATA Raid

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Fri, Jun 16, 2006 at 06:13:07PM -0400, phil wrote:
> (This is a second-hand message about something a co-worker encountered, 
> so I may have some details wrong.)
> 
> The system in question is a rack-mount server with two SATA drives that 
> he would like to have in a raid configuration.  He has an Adaptec 
> 1210SA card that is advertised as doing the job.  It also claims to be 
> Linux compatible.  When he attempts an installation -- using a 
> bleeding-edge Debian distro, I believe -- it shows him the two disks as 
> separate devices and asks how he wants them partitioned instead of 
> treating the pair as a single volume.  (My assumption was that the 
> controller should mask the existence of individual drives, but 
> obviously not.)  The documentation has a section on creating a "driver 
> floppy" which is seemingly useless since the machine has no floppy 
> drive.
> 
> Q1: Does anyone have experience with making this card work or, on the 
> other hand, with definitively failing to make it work?
> 
> Q2: If this isn't going to work, is there another hardware solution 
> that reasonably priced?

The adaptec 1210 is a fake raid card.  It is not hardware raid.  It just
uses an Sil311x chip with a bios to emulate raid until the driver takes
over the job.  dmraid is a linux driver to deal with fake raids.  Debian
does NOT support dmraid at this time.

Real hardware raid cards cost quite a bit more (atlhough adaptec is good
at being expensive even when not hardware raid).

Some hardware raid cards that are supposed to work:
3ware
areca (drivers not yet included in kernels)
IT8212
promise ex83x0/ex163x0 cards (drivers not included in kernels)

There are quite a few more too.  Check here for some of them:
http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Hardware/sata.html

Len Sorensen
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