Two RAID controllers working together.

NeghVar

NeghVar

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I have 2 x LSI Logic L3 25121-61A controllers cards. Is it possible for identical RAID controllers to work together to support a single array?
 
Are you talking two controllers attached to the same group of drives? Or one controller with x number of drives, and another controller with x number of drives, all combined into a single array?
 
3 attached to one controller, 3 attached to the other. Considering striping the three on each controller then mirroring them if it works. RAID 10
 
For what purpose? I don't think it's technically supported, unless you layered software RAID on top of the hardware RAID. Why not run all 6 on one controller?
 
NeghVar said:
I have 2 x LSI Logic L3 25121-61A controllers cards. Is it possible for identical RAID controllers to work together to support a single array?
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I think the term you may seek is Duplexing.
 
NeghVar said:
They are 4-port controllers
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Got ya...I think there's a similar 8 port version of that same controller.

I'm fairly sure duplexing isn't supported on those (or almost any controller these days). You'd basically have to overlay some software RAID 1 over the hardware RAID 0, which may be a bad idea for long term operations.
 
I think what you are looking for was something called array spanning where you could run one logical array off multiple, discreet RAID HBA's. The last card that could successfully do this to my knowledge was the Raidcore (later Broadcom) Fulcrum card from about a decade ago. Once SAS became more prevalent and large arrays became available even on lower end hardware SATA-only RAID cards became a niche item generally inhabiting the low end.
 
NeghVar said:
Did some reading on the and yes, that is the answer I am looking for.
http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/perf/raid/concepts/genDuplexing-c.html
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Actually, partition duplexing is an older term related specifically to Novell netware. Mirror partitions were duplicate copies of your data on multiple disks on the same controller channel. Duplex partitions were similar but the data was mirrored on multiple disks on different controllers. Array spanning is what you were looking for.
 
From a hardware standpoint I don't believe those controllers will give you what you are looking for in a native hardware configuration. As another has said you could build your two raid 0's the stripe them with a raid 1 in software to in effect have your raid 10 setup. Unless you are running lower power CPU's you should be fine.
 
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