Adaptec 7890 and RAID portIII RAID controller Linux Support

[Doug Ledford]

byron at mail.ifip.com wrote:
> 
> I am intrested in buying a server and i have been looking at Raid. I have found
> a neet motherboard that has dual utra II scsi and a raid portIII the motherboard
> specs are at http://www.supermicro.com/PRODUCT/MotherBoards/440GX/S2DGU.htm My
> main question is does Linux suport the Raidport III raid cards. And if it does
> can you point me where to get more info on suporting it. I am also sligtly
> intrested in knowing how much preformance differance there would be between
> softtware raid and hardware raid. If any one has alot of experance in this area
> with linux and has some time to help me pleas e-mail me a byron at lek.net

To sum up my impressions, hardware RAID is a waste of money.  It doesn't
buy speed any more (it used to when a hot server was a 486/33 and you
had an i960 chip on the RAID controller).  The newest RAID5 and RAID1
code from Ingo Molnar is *quite* reliable and pretty much on par with
what you would get in a hardware raid array.  The real reason for raid
used to be reliability in the face of failure.  Any more, with as
reliable as the software has gotten, I consider the hardware raid arrays
simply another possible point of failure.  I would go software raid if I
were you.

-- 
  Doug Ledford   <dledford at redhat.com>
   Opinions expressed are my own, but
      they should be everybody's.

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