SATA cards? RAID/Non RAID

[Tom Buskey]

On 6/26/06, Ben Scott <dragonhawk at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 6/26/06, Tom Buskey <tom at buskey.name> wrote:
> >  RaidCore/BroadCom has a 4 port and an 8 port SATA RAID card.
>
>   Ah, BroadCom makes those.  I've seen an advertisement for RaidCore,
> but haven't had a chance to evaluate one.  What's the driver support
> like under Linux?  Full GPL, binary-only, or something halfway?
> Historically, it seems like BroadCom's Linux support policy has been
> "Fuck you", which makes me pretty leery...


I worked as a QA temp at RaidCore as they got bought by BroadCom.  I was:
     setting up an array (0,1,1+n,5,10,50)
     installing RedHat/Fedora on the array (there was a driver floppy)
     using ext3/reiserfs/xfs/jfs for the install
     testing & seeing if it broke.

They were very active in the linux support when I was there (2 years ago)
and I have no doubt that group is still active.  I think they were looking
to release the code.  It may be out there (http://www.raidcore.com if it's
still there).  They do require a license to do the advanced raid
(5,50,10?,1+n??) stuff and that depends on hardware on the card.

It's not true hardware raid but it works very well.  Those guys came from
other raid companies & have a wealth of knowledge.

One *very* cool thing was transforming from one RAID level to another on the
fly.  ex: Add a 3rd drive and transform from RAID 1 to RAID 5.  Do RAID 1+n
with 3 drives.  Swap the nth drive out as a backup (SATA is hotswap...).
Keep that nth drive hidden from the OS if you want.

It's a very cool card and has very cool features.  I wish I could get a
discount on one for my home systems :-)
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