SATA Raid

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Sun, Jun 18, 2006 at 01:23:33PM -0400, Robin Humble wrote:
> good points.
> however if I put the software raid machine on a UPS, run it with 2 or
> 4G of ram, and use SATA drives then I have all of the above don't I?
> 
> hmmm... plus or minus how happy Linux and mdadm is with hotswapping
> SATA drives - how well does that work these days?

At this time, I don't believe hotswap is implemented in libata yet, so
it is not supported yet for most sata controllers.  Once it is
supported, then the majority of sata controllers will allow it.  There
are some (including a few rather common intel chips) which will probably
never support hotswap due to design mistakes.

> you need a bit of chassis support, but that's trivial compared to
> traumas that the kernel might suffer if it's not happy with SATA drives
> coming and going.

It will eventually work.  I haven't seen an announcement of support yet,
only that it is being worked on by some people.

Certainly the 3ware cards support hotswap in their drivers (which are
not libata based, but simply scsi style drivers).

Len Sorensen
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