RAID options under Fedora

[dsavage at peaknet.net]

On Wednesday November 26, 2003 "Seth Bardash"
<seth at integratedsolutions.org> wrote:
> Brian,
>
> The latest 2 port board, the 7006-2 from 3ware costs only about
> $120.00 and takes 2 IDE drives and makes them look like a single
> SCSI disk to the O/S. /dev/sdx. It supports RAID 0 striping or
> RAID 1 Mirroring.
>
> Shop around and you may be able to pick it up for less. It will
> half your disk I/O overhead when used to mirror drives and even
> gives you hot swap capability along with the mirroring.
>
> I use it in my workstation and we have many customers that need it for
> data integrity to keep their workstations and servers up even
> if a disk fails.

Seth,

I don't mean for this to dissolve into a "my dog's bigger than your dog",
but I'd like to point out that Pricewatch is listing a MegaRAID 128 board
with two U+W SCSI channels for $89. It supports RAID 0/1/5 in firmware.
I'm using a 3-channel version with 128M of cache and fifteen refurb 4.5G
7200 rpm hard drives I picked up cheap a couple of years ago. They're set
up on one channel as a single bootable 63G RAID5 array. With Seagate 73.4G
10K rpm drives I could add a terabyte array on the second channel for
under $4.5K. The point I'm trying to make is that SCSI performance,
capacity, and reliability can be had for a not too unreasonable price. To
be sure, it will cost more than a corresponding IDE solution of the same
capacity, but I'm told size isn't everything. :-)

--Doc Savage
  Fairview Heights, IL