Hi, I've a file server running on an Athlon XP 3200+ motherboard, currently using a mixture of PATA and SATA-150 drives and Fedora Core 5 Linux. 5x 120GB Seagate drives form a single raid-5 volume. One of those drives has failed, the rest are old, and I'm looking to replace all of them. I'd appreciate any help selecting components! The motherboard uses a KT600 chipset and so includes two SATA-150 connections serving 2 of the Raid-5 disks. The rest of the Raid-5 is currently run off a 2 channel Highpoint PATA PCI controller. Currently, I'm looking at buying 5 Samsung P120 series drives - the 250GB SATA-300 "SP2504C". To reduce cost I might possibly use 4 rather than 5, or might go for the 160GB variant. Reason for these drives is I've found them quiet, and reasonably fast & cool - all important to me. I don't need cutting-edge performance, but reliability is good! Controller-wise, finding suitable SATA-300 controllers is hard. Requirements include at least 4 internal ports and a PCI not PCIe interface. I might end up with a SATA-150 controller and upgrade it and the MB sometime later. I'm not really after a dedicated RAID controller such as the 3ware ones, as (a) I can't really justify the cost and (b) I want to use Linux MD for reasons of portability. Aside: Over PCI, is it better to use two separate 2-channel PCI cards or one 4-channel card? For example, 2x Sil 3112 chips or 1x Sil 3114, given that you're using all disks in JBOD mode? I'm very tempted by the Sil 3124 controller, although I've not had much luck finding a PCI version of it. In the States there's a company "SATACard" who appear to make one that's suitable, but I can't find a UK supplier. Scan are selling the Supermicro 8 Port SATA 2 RAID Card AOC-SAT2-MV8, but with not much info other than it's based on the Marvell Hercules-2 Rev. C0 SATA host controller. Others that include the various Promise and Highpoint controllers, but my experience of Promise QA is not good, and Highpoint SATA-300 seems to use Infiniband, for which Linux support looks really cutting edge. I don't want to use proprietary drivers and I'd much prefer something FC5 supports natively. Any thoughts? Thanks, Ruth - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
