SATA controllers

[Chan Chung Hang Christopher]

> For anything not originating from a SAN, I prefer software RAID... But
> the companies where I moonlight generally cannot afford SANs and since
> their Windows admins only swear by hardware RAID, I end up having to
> fight for a big enough budget to get a good RAID card - and hopefully
> have them choose mdadm in order to cut the server cost. I will stop
> here beofre this turns into one of the CentOS/Debian RAID fests
> 

* feels a twinge of wanting to join the Debian list *


> 
>>> I made that point because Karmic will try quite aggressively dmraid,
>>> as we have seen in a previous thread.
> 
>> Oh, missed that thread. Hmm,
>> https://help.ubuntu.com/community/FakeRaidHowto has a rather specious
>> reason for 'promoting' dmraid. Does dmraid support barriers? If not,
>> Karmic is then doing an installation that is by nature not data safe.
>> Nice, let's do an installation that will potentially cost a new user
>> his/her data or might be rendered useless in the event of a crash/power
>> failure instead of promoting other choices like WUBI, using a VM or
>> *gasp* buying a hard disk.
> 
> The problem with dmraid is that manufacturers like it so they can
> cheap(er) RAID especially to desktop users. Pre-9.10, getting dmraid
> to work was painful (I even remember seeing a help.ubuntu.com or
> wiki.ubuntu.com page saying that it was not really supported but then
> more or less explaining how to use it) so the developers seem to have
> tipped the balance the other way for Karmic.

Cheaper RAID? More like getting to charge a premium for a slight change 
in BIOS. We all know what manufacturers think of their software dept. A 
cost centre. :-D


> 
> AFAIK, LVM does not support barriers. This is not a topic that I know
> much about though...
> 

LVM appears to be in line for barrier support and might already have it 
already in the latest mainline kernel given that that was pointed out to 
me some time ago. Not sure about dmraid however.