Ronald Nissley wrote:
Does FC 4 support this card? Adaptec lists support for Red Hat Advanced Server 2.1 and Red Hat Enterprise Server 3.0, but doesn't mention Fedora. I am looking for SATA functionality as well as RAID 1 (mirroring). If you know of other SATA/RAID cards supported by Fedora please reply with that information. 3ware cards were mentioned some time ago, but they're quite out of my budget at $300+.
I'm only 99% sure, but I don't think the card you got does not have any RAID functionality. It's just an ordinary SATA controller with specialized driver that does RAID in software. I believe all Adaptec cards where they say "HostRAID" are fake-RAID (I guess the "HostRAID" name comes from the fact RAID is implemented by the host in software, not by the card in hardware).
There's no such thing as cheap RAID controller. All those stuff that you see listed for low price, it's all fake-RAID. Implemented in device driver software, not on the card. You'd get exactly the same functionality (and often better performance and stability) using regular Linux SATA drivers and generic Linux software RAID driver (md driver). Either fork $300+ for decent real hardware RAID, or forget about it and use generic Linux software RAID driver with whatever controllers/disks you already got in your system.
Unfortunately, marketing people started pasting word "RAID" on almost about anything, and often it seems that they had a say in technical specs too. These days it is very hard to find out if the card is a real RAID controller or fake-RAID just by looking at card's description on manufacturers web site (even technical specs are too often plagued with "marketing-speak"). Average consumer falls victim to this very often, buying additional hardware that is basically something he already got on his motherboard: just an regular dumb SATA controller.
