[mythtv-users] Anyone using RocketRAID?
Gordon McCrae
gordon-mccrae at bluebottle.com
Sat Mar 15 23:53:50 UTC 2008
Brian Wood wrote:
>
> 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
I'm afraid you're way off the mark there, even in the SCSI RAID world OS
support is a big issue.
I can recall back in 2001 I ended up switching from Caldera eServer to
SuSE because the latest Adaptec chipset RAID controllers in the DELL
server I had weren't supported (i.e. the drivers hadn't be ported to
Caldera), while they were Okay on Redhat / SuSE. I had other issues with
Redhat, so plumped for SuSE at the time (and am still using it).
At the end of the day, any device needs a driver, no matter whether it's
a RAID controller or a serial port, so the inability of the guys SATA
RAID controller to work well with Linux doesn't mean it's not a hardware
RAID card, it means the drivers / firmware / hardware don't work well
together.
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> _______________________________________________
> mythtv-users mailing list
> mythtv-users at mythtv.org
> http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
>
Cheers
Gordon
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Find out how you can get spam free email.
http://www.bluebottle.com/tag/3
More information about the mythtv-users
mailing list