The most recent cards from Promise are true hardware RAID; however, they cost almost as much as the 3ware cards. The older 3ware cards (6xxx series) are Firmware RAID, where the card's CPU (as opposed to an ASIC) does the parity math, but it's still fairly slow. The older Promise cards (the first Supertrak series, I believe) worked this way, as well as some other manufacturers. I'm not aware of any RAID 5 cards that actually use the system's CPU for parity computation, and I've researched most of them. If you're doing RAID 0, 1 or 10, it's generally not too much of an issue; it's only when you're doing parity checking (RAID 3, 5, etc) when it comes into play. I'd start out with one of the $20 cards and see how you do. Alternatively, if you don't need RAID 3 or 5, and you want a true hardware solution, you could buy one of the 3ware 5xxx or Diskswitch series cards off eBay for under $50, although these may be limited to drives of 133GB or less - you'll need to do a little research. Steve > -----Original Message----- > From: fedora-list-admin@xxxxxxxxxx > [mailto:fedora-list-admin@xxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of Jesse Keating > Sent: Thursday, December 11, 2003 8:21 PM > To: fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx > Subject: Re: raid controller recommendation > > > On Thursday 11 December 2003 16:41, Xose Vazquez Perez wrote: > > 3w RAID 'SATA' boards are _very expensive_. > > And _any_ SATA board gets same performance than 3ware. Promise and > > BCM are ready and supported by LiNUX [1]. And RAIDCore is much > > faster/cheaper than 3w, but I don't know if it runs with LiNUX. > > Sure it's more expensive. It does true hardware raid. True hardware > raid isn't cheap. Promise and BCM aren't true hardware raid last time > I checked, you're still using your own CPU to calculate raid > operations. Especially harmfull when doing raid 5. > > -- > Jesse Keating RHCE MCSE (geek.j2solutions.net) > Fedora Legacy Team (www.fedora.us/wiki/FedoraLegacy) > Mondo DevTeam (www.mondorescue.org) > GPG Public Key (geek.j2solutions.net/jkeating.j2solutions.pub) > > Was I helpful? Let others know: > http://svcs.affero.net/rm.php?r=jkeating > > > -- > fedora-list mailing list > fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx > To unsubscribe: http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list
