Adaptec makes low-end RAID gear ROC hard Adaptec is launching a new line of entry-level unified serial RAID controllers today, using the revamped design of its top-tier Series 5 gear announced in March. The Series 2 controllers can handle hardware RAID 0, 1, and 10 for SAS and SATA disk arrays, as well as tape drives using SAS expanders. The devices run on a 800MHz …
As long as Adaptec don't publish the source code of the drivers it's as useless for the typical linux user as the half baked semi-Raid hardware in today's desktop.
Anytime you want to upgrade your Linux machine you are stuck waiting for Adaptec to catch up with it's driver development and compile.
If you are a linux user then go with 3Ware
http://www.3ware.com/products/serial_ata2-9650.asp
3ware publishes the drivers in sourcecode form, which makes it easy for you to use them on any linux version or kernel and they are also integrated (because of the availability of the sourcecode) in CentOS, RHEL, ... distributions.
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I've been using the XFX Revo 64 now for well over a year. £20-30 hardware raid card, doesn't require any drivers on windows or linux (It just pretends to be a single standard IDE device). Works flawlessly.
http://www.xfxforce.com/web/product/listGenerations.jspa?generationId=65&categoryId=3
This one is supposed to have ditched the sw raid which means it doesn't need drivers...
I can't quite beleive that the XFX card is a hardware raid at that price.
Software RAID sucks but hardware has it's problems too - you become tied to the hardware card instead.
RAID 0, 1, or 10 - bah
RAID 0 lose a drive lose all your data
RAID 1 - a good backup is better - more cost effective and you can (in concept) recover [many?] previous versions of your data.
RAID 10 - at least if you lose a drive you dont lose all your data.
If your doing Hardware RAID - and NOT using RAID 3, 5 or "higher" you are
spinning your own platters.
Good thing: they ditched the stupid software RAID, or "fakeraid" as they call them in some places. I hope more manufacturers take this path instead of doing the same stupid Winmodem fiasco all over again.
Bad thing: This thingy doesn't support RAID 5. Which means I'll have to pass on this one :(
Adaptec makes hardcore rock-solid RAID controllers that more or less look like SCSI cards to an OS. 78xx & 79xx require a driver module. So does 3Ware, so does Intel or AMD or Nvidia or VIA or SiS disk controllers. The work is done in the hardware even though a driver is required.
Software RAID off-loads the calculations to the CPU.
What exactly are all you people disputing about?
You sound like a typical home user who hasn't thought of enterprise requirements, or maybe you just figure that bigger is better.
RAID is not an alternative to backups, they deal with different problems. If your service must be highly available you need redundant hot-swappable hardware to survive hardware failure (in this case a disk). Backups mean nothing if you lose business because of downtime. RAID cannot replace backups either. If you notice you accidentally deleted something a month ago RAID won't help you.
RAID10 is the only viable option for high performance systems, especially where lots of writes are involved. I'd only consider RAID5 or 6 where performance is not a major consideration, such as HD based backups.
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