On Fri, Jan 02, 2009 at 11:10:58AM -0500, Mark Lord wrote: > Jody Belka wrote: > >On Thu, Jan 01, 2009 at 02:11:37PM -0500, Justin Piszcz wrote: > >>On Thu, 1 Jan 2009, Jody Belka wrote: > >>>Cool, I think I'll go for that card then (Adaptec 1430SA). They're > >>>x4, so good bandwidth, and i'll use the x16 slots on my board for > >>>them. Only need one for now, but two eventually. And they're a good > >>>price, at only £77 each. > >>Does the card 'recognize' disks as SATA or do you have to export them as > >>JBOD? The star tech card allows you to see the sata drives directly. > > > >Well, it's just fake-raid, so surely you can always see the individual > >drives? > >Are there actually cards out there that don't? *boggle* > > > >Hmm.... ok, checking the Adaptec knowledgebase: > > > >Q: Can drives be used on an Adaptec RAID controller but not be used as > > part of a RAID array? > > > >A: Hard drives attached to an Adaptec RAID controller do not have to be > > configured as an array member to work properly. The RAID controller > > will recognize and access single disks. Please refer to your controller > > documentation for instructions on accessing drives that are not a member > > of any RAID array. > .. > > I suppose, of all of the vendors, Adaptec probably has the best chance > of getting that part right, and probably without randomly writing metadata > somewhere on the drive simply for JBOD. > > Anyone know for sure ? To follow up on this, I've now picked up one of these cards, and just did a quick test. Plugged a drive into an on-board socket, booted, made a copy of about the first 2MB. Blanked that 2MB out, swapped onto the new card, booted, made a new copy, swapped back to on-board, booted, and made another copy. Both copies, and a blank 2MB file, md5sum'ed identically, so it looks like it's safe. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ide" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
