# SCSI Controller help REALLY NEEDED

## fargazer

Howdy all!

This is probably my third post on this topic, but this is starting to cost me cold hard cash, so I would really appreciate feedback from people familiar with SCSI or 2.6 kernel support for SCSI.

I took a look at a Mylex AcceleRAID 600, but there is nothing written for drivers since mid 2002 (hence no mention of 2.6 support), and the software disk specifically says it will be very difficult to make this a boot controller.  Sucks; I will need to return and eat the restocking fee (unless I want to abandon the idea of Linux as a server and run this under Windows 2000 - that's an unpleasant but real option).

I need some concrete recommendations for controllers; I have 6 U320 73GB Seagate drives to configure for either RAID 10 or RAID 5, and I want a controller that will handle them, at a minimum of U160 speeds.  In addition, I have 6 more Ultra2 36GB drives in an external enclosure that will be run in hardware RAID 5.  The ultimate goal is:

U320 Array:

- boot partition

- swap partition

- root partition

- remainder for a LVM2 volume group

Ultra2 Array:

- all for a second LVM2 volume group

So what controller would handle all that and be able to be booted off of?  I am getting a bit frantic here, and I don't see a lot of data on the big distro sites for 2.6 since they don't have their 2.6 versions out yet.

- Fargazer

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## Will Scarlet

I would recomend ICP/Vortex controllers.  Support was also very good.

I haven't used them recently, but they are well supported by Linux (Just checked version kernel 2.6.4).

Anyway, take a look at :

http://www.icpvortex.com/

In my last configuration, I had 6 18G U160 drives with a RAID 5 configuration.  It booted of it with no problems.

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## fargazer

I have seen those, and they look intriguing, but I have a financial incentive to stick with my current vendor (SCSI4me) since A) it minimizes the restocking fee and B) I have had no complaints with his service, only with my initial choice of product.  SCSI4me does not have ICP-Vortex, though they DO have a system pull Intel RAID card, and I have had the impression they OEM for ICP-Vortex - I don't know for sure, but it appears that way.

So far, the leading candidate card is a LSI MegaRAID 320-2x, which seems to use megaraid.o for it's driver.  Can anyone tell me if this card, or members of this card's product family, can be used as a boot controller for Linux?  My ideal is to make a single RAID5 or RAID10 array out of 6 73GB U320 Seagates, have small partitions for boot, swap, and root, and use the remainder as a LVM2 partition.

- Fargazer

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## ewan.paton

 *fargazer wrote:*   

> I have seen those, and they look intriguing, but I have a financial incentive to stick with my current vendor (SCSI4me) since A) it minimizes the restocking fee and B) I have had no complaints with his service, only with my initial choice of product.  SCSI4me does not have ICP-Vortex, though they DO have a system pull Intel RAID card, and I have had the impression they OEM for ICP-Vortex - I don't know for sure, but it appears that way.
> 
> So far, the leading candidate card is a LSI MegaRAID 320-2x, which seems to use megaraid.o for it's driver.  Can anyone tell me if this card, or members of this card's product family, can be used as a boot controller for Linux?  My ideal is to make a single RAID5 or RAID10 array out of 6 73GB U320 Seagates, have small partitions for boot, swap, and root, and use the remainder as a LVM2 partition.
> 
> - Fargazer

 

i cant say much about scsi suport as i only use my onboard scsi controler but i can tell you intel take linux drivers pretty seriously, i thought i had a bug in the kernel when testing the 2.6 rc's and within 2 days was in contact with the intel driver team in charge of it. turned out to be a quirk  in the new config but i was still very impressed they were 1 monitoring bug reports and 2 activly developing kernel code all the same

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## upnix

If it helps at all, I have a Dell that uses an LSI card (Perc4/Di) with MegaRAID drivers and it works very well. I'm not 100% sure what the exact LSI model number is, but I'm certain it is an LSI card.

Running Dell installed RH9, so they may have some Dell drivers in there, but it's my understanding that it's all generic MegaRAID.

SuSE 9.1 has a 2.6 kernel if you wanted to browse through their supported hardware list.

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## fargazer

I went with the LSI U320-2X, and it is working great - it has 2.6 kernel support with the megaraid module.  I configured a single RAID50 out of 6 U320 73Gb drives.  Things I ran into that others might (or for that matter might not) find useful:

1.  The drives I found at /dev/sd/c0d0t0u0.  The partitions formed on that disk were /dev/sd/c0d0t0u0p1 through /dev/sd/c0d0t0u0p4.

2.  Compound RAID is not explicitly listed; you don't just choose an option for "RAID10" or "RAID50".  You end up forming sets of raid 5's or raid 1's, and then setting them to "spannable" by configuring several of them at once.  

3.  In compound RAID, it truely does it in the order it says:  RAID10 is a stripe of mirrors, and RAID50 is a stripe of parity arrays.

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## ciaranm

LSI is the way to go if you don't want to spend loads on a really good IBM / Compaq controller. Very well written drivers. Stay clear of Adaptec -- the recent driver screwups are inexcusable.

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## peaceful

 *fargazer wrote:*   

> I went with the LSI U320-2X, and it is working great - it has 2.6 kernel support with the megaraid module.  I configured a single RAID50 out of 6 U320 73Gb drives.  Things I ran into that others might (or for that matter might not) find useful:
> 
> 1.  The drives I found at /dev/sd/c0d0t0u0.  The partitions formed on that disk were /dev/sd/c0d0t0u0p1 through /dev/sd/c0d0t0u0p4.
> 
> 2.  Compound RAID is not explicitly listed; you don't just choose an option for "RAID10" or "RAID50".  You end up forming sets of raid 5's or raid 1's, and then setting them to "spannable" by configuring several of them at once.  
> ...

 

I'm considering buying an LSI MegaRAID 320-2X SCSI RAID Controller for a dual-opteron system I'm building as a database server.  Are there any other (and perhaps more current) experiences with this card, or LSI cards in general?  Specifically, I'd like to be able to have a big raid 10 that I can actually monitor the current status as well as ensure that data will be preserved if I buy the optional battery pack and then suffer a power loss.

Any input would be welcome!

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## fargazer

Well, I'm still using the LSI dual channel, and it's working great.  Our hospital has also used the single channel LSI card in a ESX VMware box (based on a RedHat 7.x kernel), and it's been performing as a champ for quite some time now.  I would purchase no other RAID card if I wanted a SCSI RAID card to run under Linux.

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