On Friday 10 February 2006 12:39, Rick van Hattem <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote about 'Re: [gentoo-user] [OT] 3ware SATA Raid': > On Friday 10 February 2006 10:14, Etaoin Shrdlu wrote: > > So, I'm finally going to buy a 3ware 9550sx SATA Raid board. > > > > From what I've read, it is well supported by linux and it should do > > true hardware raid (ie, the OS sees only one drive). Anyway, I found > > little documentation about the so-called hot-swap feature. > > As I understand it, that means one should be able to remove a faulty > > disk from the array, and subsequently insert a new disk, all without > > powering off the machine, and with the OS being unaware of what's > > going on. Is my understanding correct or am I too optimistic? > > You are correct, you are able to hot-swap the drives without rebooting > or anything. > > But...... Areca cards are a lot faster for the serial ata stuff, altough > I'm not sure about there linux driver support, it's worth to take a look > at there stuff :)
They have supported drivers (GPL'd, IIRC) that go back to 2.3.x kernels. 2.6.16 might include them in mainline, mm-sources has included them since 2.6.14, at least. I think RHEL4 will include the drivers in their kernel. They also provide 32- and 64-bit command line utilities that can do all the controller operations from within linux, as well as both 32- and 64-bit http servers that will run on the machine with the controller and provide a remote (or local) management console that provides all the controller operations. If you want to integrate the controller management into a larger tool, or write a gtk/qt frontend, they publish the public API provided by their closed source, but freely available arecalib. Areca cards do handle the hot-swap feature mentioned by the OP. Unfortunately (and from what I've read this is a limitation of linux...), newly created arrays or pass-though drives do not immediately appear in /dev nor do removed arrays or pass-through drives disappear. That said, the scenario given by the OP (replacing a faulty disk live) does not add or remove device node in /dev so it will work perfectly. I love my Areca 1160. There's only one feature I wish it handled that it doesn't: the non-standard RAID 1n, which is RAID 1 (mirroring) with more than 2 drives in the array -- something that should've been trivial for them to implement. So, instead I use RAID 6, which is fairly nice. -- Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. [EMAIL PROTECTED] ICQ: 514984 YM/AIM: DaTwinkDaddy -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
