Where's the hardware compatibility list?

[Marian POPESCU]

Hi,

I have an ABIT KR7A-RAID with HPT372 controller.
I succesfully tried to build and install the kernel module driver from
source: http://www.highpoint-tech.com/hpt3xx-opensource-v131.tgz

I installed as well the Raid Manager and I can see the 2 HDDs connected on
the controller as a RAID 1 disc.

Actually my system (RH9 and now FC1) is installed on a third disc (Primary
Master), but on the RAID disc I have several NTFS partitions that are
easily accessible. So, it works. But I cannot guarantee that there will
not be error while writing on the discs (I have not tried that yet).

HTH,
Marian

On Tue, 25 Nov 2003 12:48:54 +0100, Jeroen Lankheet wrote:

>>On Mon, 2003-11-24 at 22:39, Jeroen Lankheet wrote:
>>> Hi there,
>>>
>>> I need to upgrade from RH7.3 either to RH9 or to Fedora. I base my
> decision
>>> on the presence of HPT370 RAID support. RH9 has a 3rd party driver. But i
>>> cannot find any information on Fedora RAID support, or any other hardware
>>> support.
>>>
>>> Could anyone please tell me where it is?
>>
>>Always the recommendation is to avoid HPT or Promise RAID for several
>>good reasons:
>>
>>1) It doesn't gain you much of any real performance.  If you use RAID-0,
>>some synthetic benchmarks show better thruput, but real-world
>>Re: Where's the hardware compatibility list?Re: Where's the hardware Re:
> Where's >the hardware compatibility list?
>>compatibility list?applications are not much better.
>>2) It isn't real hardware RAID.  It is poorly implemented software RAID
>>done by the drivers.  Real software RAID by the Linux or Windows
>>operating system tends to have greater performance and reliability.
>>3) If you rely on the 3rd party binary-only drivers from Promise or HPT,
>>you are absolutely stuck in upgrading.  To make matters worse sometimes
>>those binary-only drivers have been unstable, and the community or RH
>>will cannot and will not support you.  You need to rely on the company's
>>support, and in most cases they ignore you.
>>4) It is *possible* to get it running using the /dev/ataraid devices for
>>the root filesystem, but only if you install to a single disk and copy
>>everything over manually and redo the GRUB or lilo boot loader.  It
>>isn't worth the effort however because this makes it a pain in the butt
>>to upgrade, and you don't gain much of any real performance increase.
>>
>>Maybe 2 years ago I used to do #4, but it was too much of a pain so I
>>switched back to single disks.
>>
>>Warren
> 
> -----------------------
> 
> Thanks for the warnings.
> If Abit didn't like the performance of the HPT370 chip, then why bother
> putting it in my KT7-RAID mainboard? Is it because of the term RAID sounding
> fast?
> It looks from the change logs that i will have to go beyond kernel 2.4.18
> because of a lot of USB changes. So i will try to upgrade the latest kernel
> and load the HPT370 driver module. If that doesn't work, i'm going to say
> farewell to my semi-RAID.
> I still consider myself a newbie and don't know anything about software
> RAID.
> 
> Jeroen.