Well, first off... the software RAId works just fine... but if you want hardware RAID, then there are things to consider. How many disks do you need to support, what is your budget and what sort of performance criteria do you need? If cost if your biggest limitation, then it comes down to how many disks you need and what RAID level you want. Personally, 3Ware is probably your best bet in terms of overall perfomnce and supprt of different RAID levels. They make cards that range from two IDE ports to 12 IDE ports and will run JBOD, RAID 0, 1, 5 and 0+1. They have CLI and web admin interfaces and support things like background disk scrubs and verifies. You can support the OS on the RAId volume as well and they can be REALLY fast, depending on the RAID level and disks you choose. I've had great luck with the Western Digital "JB" series disks on these controllers. The promise controllers do works as well, but you need to stay within a certain range of model number on the chipsets... also, I am not sure about the various RAID levels that the drivers currently support. I know RAID 0 and 1 are supported. With Highpoint, the driver only support RAID 0 at present. If you have more budget, you can go with Mylex Extreme RAID, Qlogic, AMI MegaRAID or Adaptec which are all SCSI based solutions... of course the cards cost more and the disks are more expensive. But again, if your performance requirements are strict, you may nee to go with SCSI. The 15K RPM disks are pretty sweet and can generate very high random i/o rates. Then you can also look at FCAL solutions... but those get REALLY costly. - Herman Bill Parker wrote:

Hi All,

I wanted some input from the list about hardware RAID (1 or 5) available for SuSE 8.0. I'd like a low to medium cost solution, if possible. Also, what way do most sites maintain the RAID they use (critical data on RAID, OS on completely separate drive, etc)?

-Bill

On Sun, 2003-01-05 at 10:07, Bill Parker wrote:

Hi All,

I wanted some input from the list about hardware RAID (1 or 5) available for SuSE 8.0. I'd like a low to medium cost solution, if possible. Also, what way do most sites maintain the RAID they use (critical data on RAID, OS on completely separate drive, etc)?

-Bill

You can pick up some DPT hardware SCSI RAID controllers on eBay for cheap; these are fully supported under SuSE. DPT was bought by Adaptec a while ago, and DPT's line was rebadged as Adaptec. -- ___________________________________________________________________ A Message From... L. Mark Stone http://www.lmstone.com