Raid 5 PCI Card -- 4x SATA Linux

[The_Engineer]

I do not need hardcore performance from these drives as they will be an array simply for backup or possibly media storage in the future. The biggest demand this raid will see is a streaming video file at 720p over the network to my TV.

That said, I have a dual p3 1ghz box I would like to install Linux on, and put my 4x 500GB SATA Maxtor drives that are currently unused into it The drives are SATA II capable but I am not as concerned with the SATA2 bandwidth as I am with the general compatibility and reliability of the raid card. I have heard horror stories of raid cards and Linux and as I am rather new to *nix I was hoping to find something that would be compatible with Ubuntu server (the distro I was hoping to use)

Any suggestions for a card? Newegg only has highpoint and PROMISE controllers some claiming linux support with users saying the opposite. :rolleyes: My budget for this card is about $200 -- it must be PCI due to the nature of the system I am installing it into. Thanks in advance for all the help

(afterthought: If Linux as a consensus is going to be a PITA for me to work with this on then I can revert to win2k, but for security reasons would be less likely to point it to the internet for any sort of a server...)

[unhappy_mage]

The sil3114 chipset, while not top-of-the-line performance, is supported under Linux. Thus, even this (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815124020) will work under Linux for a raid 5 solution. However, there exist neither hardware-based nor driver-level raid solutions for this card, so if you were to revert to Windows you'd be stuck without raid 5 functionality.

[The_Engineer]

hmm -- what kind of load are we talking to run raid5 in linux on that? I am curious how much that would load my 1ghz cpu's -- I do have over 1GB of memory in there...

Software solution is something I tend to think I want to stay away from due to long term reliability and portability (incase my old mobo dies, I do not want to lose all of my data just because I can't boot that linux install any longer....)

[The Hunter]

The performance shouldn't be a big deal at all for that set up. The Linux software solution is actually a lot more portable than just about any other RAID solution. The reason is that it's totally hardware agnostic - any hardware controller supported by Linux will work. All you need to get your raid setup working in any computer is a compatible version of mdadm (the raid utility, comes with most linux distros, and easy to get if they don't) and intact hard drives. All the config data should be stored on the drives. So you can take the drives out of one system and put them in another with completely different controllers and motherboard and it will work perfectly.

[unhappy_mage]

I'd expect ~50MB/s reads and writes. And as The Hunter says, it's controller-agnostic - you can move the array to a different controller or even a different machine without any problems. It's plenty fast to keep up with HD video.

[The_Engineer]

thanks for the replies. I will plan on getting linux up and running with some sort of a controller that will hopefully be semi-reliable. I just bought a good PSU to power this beast so hopefully I can get things up and running!