[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.
>
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Cheers
Gordon

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