SATA Raid

[Dave Cramer]

On 17-Jun-06, at 11:36 AM, Lennart Sorensen wrote:

> 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)

I think they are in later 2.6 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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