Elvis Chen <mailto:chene77@hotmail.com> wrote:

Greetings,

I'm in the process of constructing a high-end computer for my lab. One of the thing we would like to have is a RAID5 file system that we can use as a backup system. Upon a little of searching on the web, it looks like Highpoint's RocketRAID 1640 is a cheap/decent choice.

The manufacture has driver support to tp Suse 9.0 (for AMD64). I'm here to seek you opinion; has anyone use it, what do you think, and whether this card will work under Suse 9.1?

Also, will I be able to create a bootable RAID5 (no MS-Windows installation) under Suse 9.1?

tia,

Elvis

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http://join.msn.com/?pgmarket=en-ca&page=byoa/prem&xAPID=1994&DI=1034&SU =http://hotmail.com/enca&HL=Market_MSNIS_Taglines Elvis, The 1640 is not really "high-end". I only say this because I've been through the gauntlet trying to get Highpoint style RAID cards working. BTW, I was using an Epox 4PCS3+ board with the hpt374 chip - but this chip is used in both SATA and PATA configurations from what I understand. The board specs looket great, 2 normal IDE connectors, plus 4 IDE connectors connected to the Highpoint RAID controller. Howver, the drivers on the Highpoint website appear to be the same between the 1640 and the embedded htp374 chip. I was able to get the Highpoint drives installed on 9.0 (after manually compiling). But I ended up just using the standard Linux software RAID, its substantially faster than using their driver for the BIOS-assisted RAID you get using the Highpoint drivers. Their drivers give you the illusion that you are doing high-end RAID, but sadly that's not the case. If you really want "high-end" RAID 5, you will need to pay for a card with a builtin XOR processor and onboard RAM - starting at around $300 US. For our production machine we went with real RAID controllers (actually U320 SCSI though) and are very pleased - the performance, tools and support easily justify the $500 we paid for the Intel SRCU42L card and the expensive SCSI drives. But that is not the case for all situations and RAID is important for data safety. So, if money is an issue (it was for me on our development environment file server :), it turns out that we have been quite pleased using Linux software RAID. I created two 120MB RAID 1 arrays and put them in a Logical Volume Group. Then as necessary I can allocate storage to different mount points as the needs grow. This is much better than trying to guess how much storage you need for each partition/mount point. Its been running fine for 2 months now. There are certainly folks on this list with more experience than myself - but I think this is a good solution. Good luck - Richard