[mythtv-users] Anyone using RocketRAID?

Brian Wood beww at beww.org
Sat Mar 15 19:45:54 UTC 2008


On Mar 15, 2008, at 12:47 PM, John Welch wrote:

> Just wanted to add some perspective from my own personal experience,  
> not with this particular card, but with the company who makes these  
> cards, HighPoint.  First, I have to qualify my comments by saying  
> that this was several years ago and it was with what was probably  
> the lowest card on their food chain.  Having said that, my  
> experience with them was horrible.  I was just looking for a PCI  
> card so that I could add some more ATA hard drives to my system.  I  
> chose the HighPoint card because it was reasonably priced and they  
> seemed to be Linux friendly.  However, I came to find out that their  
> Linux support only included a small number of distros.  I still  
> thought I was OK because RedHat was one of the supported distros,  
> but as someone pointed out in a previous post, they only supported  
> specific kernels within the supported distros, and did not seem good  
> at keeping things up to date.  The card kind of worked with the  
> standard, up to date, RedHat kernel that I was using at the time,  
> but I had issues with the card not recognizing the full capacity of  
> one of my drives, and I also had some problems with the system  
> locking up.  I tried contacting support via email, and although they  
> did respond, they were not very helpful.  I have to admit I never  
> tried calling their support line.  I simply gave up, and found  
> another, cheaper card from NewEgg; which although it didn't  
> specifically say that Linux was supported, worked out of the box,  
> with the stock kernel.

I'll qualify this by saying my only experience with hardware RAID  
cards is with SCSI units, not SATA, but I don't see where it would  
make any difference.

As I understand it, and in my experience, a hardware RAID card  
shouldn't care about what OS it's running on, or what kernel, or  
anything else.

The card should have its own BIOS, including a built-in program for  
creating and testing arrays. It should appear to the OS as a single  
drive, of the type it supports, or possible multiple single drives.

So I can't see how it would make any difference what distro or kernel  
you are running, it should just appear to be a drive or drives.

If it DOES matter what kernel or distro you are running than it is not  
a "hardware" RAID card, and probably has more in common with the  
'RAID" support on a lot of mobos, which is just a little memory to  
store setup parameters with hooks into a (usually Windows) software  
RAID driver.

Usually you can tell what you're dealing with by the cost, but the  
card in question seems high priced enough that it should be a true  
RAID card.

beww

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