Comparison of Nine SATA RAID 5 Adapters 221
Robbedoeske writes "Tweakers.net has put online a comparison of nine Serial ATA RAID 5 adapters. Can the establishment counter the attack of the newcomers? Which of the contestants delivers the best performance, offers the best value for money and has the best featureset?"
Eight or Nine? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Eight or Nine? (Score:5, Interesting)
Seriously, though, I have been seeing many servers start to come in with SATA drives. Right now it is low end and off-brand servers. Dell even ships SATA drives in their cheapest server line. Sure SCSI has high spin rates & throughput, but they are freakin expensive. A good SCSI raid controller costs close to $1000 and a good SCSI hard drive can cost $400. It is so expensive, that it is reallly worth it sometimes to get the SATA drives in servers. I haven't seen that reliability of SATA over SCSI is a problem. I'm truly hoping that SCSI goes the way of the dodo. Its a pain to use. Who know what kind of cable you're supposed to use with that external SCSI device. SCSI, in its current form, is just opening itself up to becoming antiquated.
Re:Eight or Nine? (Score:2)
If you just want redundancy, go ahead. But if you want better system
SCSI vs SATA (Score:5, Informative)
Perhaps, though personally I've had far more trouble getting SATA (and IDE) drives to work than SCSI drives and I've used both extensively. Driver issues mostly. SCSI's performance is better in multi-user systems, it's easy to set up, drivers tend to be less problematic especially on systems other than Windows, and it can have more devices attached. People claim it's more reliable though I have no evidence of this, and frankly am a bit dubious of the claim. SATA is also easy to set up and is a lot cheaper, though the drivers are still less ubiquitous than with SCSI and performance doesn't match SCSI yet for multi-user systems. (on a single user system it doesn't matter much)
That said, the next generation of SCSI is Serial Attached SCSI [adaptec.com] which is compatible with SATA. A SAS controller will be able to use SATA drives if you don't need the extra features of SAS. SCSI isn't going away, it's just adapting.
Re:SCSI vs SATA (Score:5, Informative)
I put SCSI in my servers (RAID or otherwise) when I want the box to run for years and years under heavy load and not have to worry about replacing drives regularly.
With SCSI, your paying for the quality control/quality assurance more than anything else.
From what I understand a good SATA drive has the same TTL quality as a good IDE drive, just faster performance.
Re:SCSI vs SATA (Score:2)
SCSI drives available to the general consumer don't go higher than 180GB. SATA and IDE are way beyond that mark. If someone has a link to a 400GB single SCSI drive, let me know.
Onboard sata controllers are usually software (Score:2)
Linux sees then as completely seperate hard drives. Turns out the sata raid controller relies on a windows driver and is nothing more than software raid. I'm not even sure it's accellerated in any way.
So I just used linux software mirroring and it works fine. (Had to use a sarge nightly to recognize all the hardware.)
I did read the article. (Score:2)
So take a chill pill, a deep breath, count to 10 and smile.
Re:Eight or Nine? (Score:2)
And did you know that rebuilding a SATA RAID can take ages (which overlaps with times when you need every bit of performance you can get)?
> Who know (sic!) what kind of cable you're supposed to use with that external SCSI device.
How many companies have a single disk or JBOD (or RAID without enclosure) on an external SCSI connection without enclosure?
> SCSI, in its current form, is just opening itself up to becoming antiquated.
Ev
Re:Eight or Nine? (Score:2)
It would be more accurate to say that the SCSI pricing model is becoming antiquated. Vendors have gotten used to being able to charge a 300%+ premium for SCSI hardware because, until recently, it was the only game in town for serious server storage.
The current generation of SATA gives you roughly 90% of the performance of SCSI for less than 50% of the price. Unless you absolutely need every shred of I/O throughput money can
Re:Eight or Nine? (Score:2)
Depends on size and features. Our Adaptec U320 controllers cost $150. 36G fujitsu SCA drives cost $100 a shot. Speed, reliability and hot-swap capability are well worth the money when your server is actually doing something worthwhile...
Re:Eight or Nine? (Score:5, Funny)
It was a parity bit, ignore it.
Re:Eight or Nine? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Eight or Nine? (Score:2, Informative)
From Page 2 of TFA:
Note: Since the original Dutch article was published in late January, we have finished tests of the 16-port Areca ARC-1160 using 128MB, 512MB and 1GB cache configurations and RAID 5 arrays of up to 12 drives. The ARC-1160 was using the latest 1.35 beta firmware. Furthermore, a non-disclosure agreement on the LSI MegaRAID SCSI 320-2E PCI Express x8 SCSI RAID adapter was lifted. The performance graphs have been updated to include the Areca ARC-1160 and LSI MegaRAID SCSI 320-2E results. Di
Re:Eight or Nine? (Score:2, Informative)
The results of the LSI MegaRAID SATA 150-4 and MegaRAID SATA 150-6 have been combined in the graphs since there is basicly no performance difference between to two in configurations up to four drives.
Re:Eight or Nine? (Score:2)
It supports a daughter board for controller redudancy.
Note, I don't have the daughter board and I can't test how well it works. Overall, I think the feature set was a bit understated. (It's definately in the affordable range too)
Though I would have liked a non-host based option for raid access, it was one of my more appealing choices when I had a new system come in for backups.
32 pages? No thanks. (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.tweakers.net/reviews/557/32 [tweakers.net]
Where it has the executive summary:
Areca ARC-1120: highly recommended
RAIDCore BC4852: recommended
HighPoint RocketRAID 1820A: recommended
For several reasons, we will refuse recommendations on the remaing adapters in this comparison
I think that pretty much covers the jist of the article.
Re:32 pages? No thanks. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:32 pages? No thanks. (Score:2)
Well, the answer is, to quote Spaced: "skip to the end".
Areca ARC-1120 is the best card, and the HighPoint RocketRAID 1820A is the best value for money.
Easy!
Re:32 pages? No thanks. (Score:2)
Maybe in Dilbert.
Do You Speak Printer-Friendly? (Score:2)
Re:32 pages? No thanks. (Score:2)
Re:32 pages? No thanks. (Score:2)
Interesting that the 3ware offerings performed... (Score:5, Interesting)
3ware Escalade 8506-8 is lagging far behind the competition. Moreover, it misses important features such as online capacity expansion, online RAID level migration and RAID 50 support.
http://www.tweakers.net/reviews/557/6 [tweakers.net]
What they say in the article is almost damning really...
Re:Interesting that the 3ware offerings performed. (Score:2)
3ware needs to step it up w/ SATA controllers.
Re:Interesting that the 3ware offerings performed. (Score:2)
I've had my share of 3ware cards drop a raid pack and need to be rebuilt from the BIOS, doing nothing special at all but running a RAID-0 as a big storage mountpoint. When the online rebuild tools fail you have massive downtime.
Re:Interesting that the 3ware offerings performed. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Interesting that the 3ware offerings performed. (Score:2)
That should never mean that it's unreliable because the controllers flake out!
For storing large amounts of easily-recreatable data on a local machine it's a very acceptable way to keep the costs low.
Re:Interesting that the 3ware offerings performed. (Score:3, Informative)
Most of our support has been through a VAR (who sucks too, but that's
Re:Interesting that the 3ware offerings performed. (Score:2)
I had the rebuild problems also with my Promise SX6000 controller, but strangely I had it more in the beginning, and when I used ReiserFS on my RAID-5 system (running Red Hat 9).
The same goes for upgrading the controllers firmware.
It seems that both companies make the most money of a market based around small companies who want to give themselves the air of professionality by implementing their own storage solutions.
Re:Interesting that the 3ware offerings performed. (Score:5, Informative)
Both are nice cards, but I would not recommend them to anyone who does not have extensive PC hardware knowledge. They are fussy, carpicious and very hard to troubleshoot when they go wrong.
Re:Interesting that the 3ware offerings performed. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Interesting that the 3ware offerings performed. (Score:2)
I wouldn't say that. For one thing I had my 3ware controller running just fine with debian out of the box and I didn't have to tweak anything. While it might not be the best performing it at the very least has excellent support in Linux, for example smartctl can work with 3ware (but not any other raid controller) not to
Re:Interesting that the 3ware offerings performed. (Score:2, Informative)
Obviously if you're looking at a raid 5 solution, you're moving more towards higher end stuff, so it would be hard to recommend anything that performs poorly there. Rather dissapointing, but probably not that surprising since their SATA cards seem very similar to the ATA ca
Don't plan on mixing Highpoint cards (Score:5, Informative)
When I removed the drives in windows, it booted up without problems. Highpoint has sent me diag tools to run rather than building this in their lab!
I'm not too impressed with them so far.
Re:Don't plan on mixing Highpoint cards (Score:2)
The only one that ever gave me a problem of all of them was a Rocket Raid 100 (HPT370A based). Promise has the best card of them all IMHO (performance wise, good drivers,
I dread to think (Score:2)
Re:I dread to think (Score:2)
The system is running eGroupWare [egroupware.org] for around 40 users and is also a store for their mailboxes. Load is not that heavy and such a non-issue that I've not bothered to benchmark anything
There was no hassle installing the drivers from the manufacturer's Web site. The initial RAID 1 sync on the disks took 90 mins.
Re:I dread to think (Score:2)
Just some of the things I am doing with my system (which has BTW, also 2 Gig RAM).
You know the cheap-reliable-fast triangle. (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, cheap+reliable == linux + softraid + Enhanced Network Block Device [uc3m.es] + Enterprise Volume Management System [sourceforge.net] (or LVM2). It is often faster than non-hw-raid (fake-hw [linux.yyz.us]controllers.
Re:You know the cheap-reliable-fast triangle. (Score:2)
Can you suggest such a clear cut answer for the "cheap, fast" vertex?
[Yes - I would have a use. No - this wouldn't mean I'm playing fast-and-loose with unrecoverable data!]
Re:You know the cheap-reliable-fast triangle. (Score:2)
How about
Re:You know the cheap-reliable-fast triangle. (Score:2)
Drivers? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a nice article comparing performance but without a serious analysis of drivers along with it for Windows AND linux (and Mac if applicable) the article isn't complete. I don't really care which one is fastest if I can't run it on my system.
Re:Drivers? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Drivers? (Score:2)
Re:Drivers? (Score:2, Informative)
If it doesn't say (Score:3, Interesting)
couldn't agree more (Score:2)
It would be nice if one could expand the array "hot," rather than having to copy data around and redefine/reformat the array, but in terms of reliability in protecting my data against disk faults (I've had several disks die, and replacement was a breeze, with zero downtime). As oth
My thoughts (Score:5, Informative)
The RAIDCore BC4852 seems fastest for sequential reads/writes.
BOTH of these have linux support. The Areca supports: Mandrake (9.0),Red Hat (7.3, 8.0, 9.0, AS 3.0), Fedora Core (2, 2 AMD64), SuSE (7.3, 9.1 Pro, 9.0 SLES, 9.0 SLES AMD64)
The RAIDCore: Red Hat (9.0, AS 3.0), Fedora Core (1)
The Areca also supports Windows XP and Server 2003 64-bit versions and BSDs: 4.2R, 4.4R, 5.2.1 (incl. source).
Also, the Areca ARC-1160 (they finished testing after the original article was written, so it didn't make it into most of the text) appears at the top of all of the Index/performance tests, except for "Fileserver - Large Filesize - RAID 1/10" [tweakers.net] and "My SQL - Data Drive - RAID 1/10" [tweakers.net].
My experience with 3ware (Score:4, Interesting)
Moral of this story? You get what you pay for. SCSI should be used for servers.
To be fair, however, I was never able to determine if it was a result of using S-ATA, 3Ware or the linux device driver.
Re:My experience with 3ware (Score:2, Interesting)
OTOH, I have an Apple Xserve RAID that uses SATA drives with a fibre channel interface. In using it, I cannot tell its not a SCSI system.
Re:My experience with 3ware (Score:2)
Another serv
waste of time and money. (Score:3, Informative)
Linux software RAID. Makes all this crap obsolete except for some specific cases.
I can have as many drives as I want, I can have hot swapability, I can have hot spares and all sorts of fun stuff.
Add LVM on top of that and you have a solution that is much superior then going out and buying any raid controller, except for the most fastest.
Linux software raid is actually VERY nice, I don't know of any OS that has better setup.
Re:waste of time and money. (Score:3, Insightful)
So, you're saying that somehow your software RAID is calculating XOR bits and such without putting a serious hurt on your CPU and memory? Interesting.
You're also saying that your motherboard has hot-swap capabilities built into it? Because it takes nothing short of specialized hardware controllers and BIOS's to be able to hot-plug a drive in. (ATA/SATA drive initialization is done d
Re:waste of time and money. (Score:5, Interesting)
At any given point in time, your system is in one of three states:
- partially idle (there's unused CPU and disk I/O capacity),
- CPU-bound (the CPU is fully utilized but there's disk I/O bandwidth available), or
- I/O bound (the CPU has spare cycles, but the disk can't provide data fast enough to put them to use).
I suppose that a heavily overloaded system could be both CPU and I/O bound, but it would require a mix of CPU- and disk-intensive processes that isn't usually seen in practice.Let's ignore the partially idle case, in which there's ample disk and CPU to go around, as it doesn't really matter in this scenario whether the CPU or disk controller perform the XOR operations.
In the case of a CPU-bound process, you're going to incur the additional CPU overhead of the XOR operation. XOR is almost absurdly fast, particularly if the data is in the CPU's cache. I'm pretty sure that modern CPUs execute XOR on at least one byte per clock cycle. But let's say, for the sake of argument, that it takes three cycles per byte. On a CPU clocked at 3 GHz, you'd be able to perform XORs on one gigabyte of data per second if you ignore memory and cache issues. Given moderate memory bandwidth, you're also able to transfer over a gigabyte of data to or from the CPU per second. Given a more reasonable amount of data (say, one megabyte, to transfer), you'd be looking at a CPU impact of around one millisecond to perform the XOR. That's a 0.1% impact at most in a CPU-bound environment, and that's presuming you're doing a megabyte of disk I/O per second.
Now let's look at the I/O-bound case. Here, the CPU is sitting around waiting for the disk I/O to finish up. In this case, it clearly doesn't matter who's doing the XOR operations, since the CPU isn't fully utilized. PCI bus utilization is going to be increased by up to 100% (in the worst-case scenario involving drive mirroring; the worst-case RAID5 scenario is a 50% increase). A typical server's 66 MHz 64-bit PCI bus has a capacity of around 533 megabytes per second (PCI Express increases this dramatically, but let's stick with pessimistic examples for now). At the moment, a SCSI bus tops out at 320 megabytes per second, and those transfer rates are only achievable with at least four drives on the channel and an almost exclusively sequential I/O mix (the best-case numbers for a 15,000-RPM drive are about 100 megabytes/second). So there's generally bus bandwidth to spare.
You raise a number of other points in your note that are potentially issues (hot swappability, for example). But I've become convinced that the CPU/machine performance argument against software RAID really only made sense when CPUs/memory/bus bandwidth were much more constrained.
Re:waste of time and money. (Score:2)
My suspicion is that the CPU is a whole lot faster at performing an XOR on a relatively large block of memory than it is at doing a correspondingly larger number of XOR iterations on a few bytes. In particular, the MMX instruction set extensions were designed to handle logical operators on large blocks efficiently. By doing it a little at a time, you spend a correspondingly large amount of time handling your loop counter and associated comparisons.
TRUE raid? (Score:3, Interesting)
In linux you will be treating such cards as a software raid array. Kind of defeats the point of buying "hardware" in the first place.
Wankers (the manufacturers).
Re:TRUE raid? (Score:2)
Yes they are.
Re:TRUE raid? (Score:2)
Beware hardware RAID (Score:5, Interesting)
That's what I like about software RAID on Linux - you can mount the array on another linux box if you need to.
Have yet to see a good comparison between low-end hardware RAID and Linux software RAID..
Re:Beware hardware RAID (Score:3, Insightful)
We bought a 3ware controller for a large and somewhat valuable datastore (high resolution images of Alan Turing's personal papers which include all the text available elsewhere plus handwritten annotations, scribbled diagrams, etc.)
In the end I only used it as a fast and not particularly full-featured ATA controller, running Linux software RAID on top because it was not only _faster_ in every test I could think of, but also simpler to set up and maintain.
T
Re:Beware hardware RAID (Score:5, Informative)
If you are dumb enough to use RAID as a substitute for backing up, that is.
Re:Beware hardware RAID (Score:2)
Anyway, it's rather hard to backup something like 1 TB of data using cheap storage solutions which is why RAID as backup is currently viable. Just don't use it for sensitive information and beware of software issues...
Re:Beware hardware RAID (Score:2)
It's not really, anymore - or at least, it shouldn't be.
For what I used to pay for a single DLT tape a few years ago I can get an external USB drive of greater size. The problem, and it is a big one, is that most backup software doesn't have any idea how to properly take advantage of something as advanced as hot-swappable, external, fast USB mass-storage.
Re:Beware hardware RAID (Score:2)
My biggest problem with software raid is that it is very alpha software. Problems occur, and there's little documentation for the new tools when you need help - and trust me - when you're data is on the line you won't want to putz around with something that isn't well documented if you don't have a support network to h
my 2 cents (Score:2, Informative)
Whew (Score:2)
The Article Never Explains What RAID 5 Is (Score:4, Informative)
There are so many different flavors of RAID it can be hard to keep them straight if you're not working with them every day.
Anyway there are good explanations of RAID here [techtarget.com] and here [prepressure.com].
Re:The Article Never Explains What RAID 5 Is (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you kidding?
RAID 5 can be explained in a few pages - the math, the implementation, the whole bit. Have you ever seen a technical drawing of a transmission? Modern slushboxes are about the most advanced mechanical engineering application that the average person ever comes in contact with (when they aren't at the airport).
You won't find an article that does most of the issues involved in designing and implementing a transmission justice. I know you just meant it as an example, but still.
32 pages? Linux ? (Score:2)
Actually, I only searched the conclusion....
Re:32 pages? Linux ? (Score:2)
http://www.tweakers.net/reviews/557/13 [tweakers.net]
http://www.tweakers.net/reviews/557/14 [tweakers.net]
Wow... RAID-6 cards! (Score:2)
The interesting thing is that the Areca card is infact SATA-II. Things like NCQ, and port multipliers can really elevate usefulness. Buy a cheap 4-port multiplier card an
Re:Wow... RAID-6 cards! (Score:2)
http://www.acnc.com/04_01_06.html
Re:Wow... RAID-6 cards! (Score:2)
So, where can you buy the Areca cards? (Score:2)
The review looks nice, I'm convinced. If I want to buy an Areca card in the US, where would I go?
Google doesn't help. Pricewatch doesn't help. Tom's Hardware didn't provide an answer that I could see. Nothing on eBay but palm trees. What appears to be the US distributor [areca.us] has a "Where to buy" link that points to the Taiwanese site which points to... the US distributor.
Informative, but badly written (Score:2)
Samples from TFA:
"...caused by differences in I/O processor and I/O controller performance, cache memory, available bus bandwidth etcetera."
If you're not going to use the traditional abbreviation "etc." at least use it properly; "et cetera."
"You can't make judgements by simply..."
Judgment is spelled with one "e"
Not hardware RAID (Score:3, Informative)
See my SATA RAID FAQ [linux.yyz.us] for a listing of the most common SATA chipsets which are sold as RAID, but are really software RAID (a.k.a. "fake RAID").
I'm also rather amazed that this wasn't mentioned in the review, but I admit I did not read all the of the 32 pages.
MOD PARENT UP (Score:2)
Because Jeff knows what he is talking about. He can't afford not to :-)
Re:Not hardware RAID (Score:2)
The protocol, the cards and the drives (Score:2)
SCSI cards and drives have been created specifically for enterprise use. That means that they perform, and that they last. The only way to compare these technologies is to use an expensive S-ATA controller with fast hardware XOR, large cache and controllers and drives that support command queueing. Furthermore the drives sho
My RAID fantasy: 1394/USB2 Raid hub (Score:3, Interesting)
The hub could present whatever defined logical volumes to the OS as additional mass storage devices on the hub, and a configuation application would be all that was needed since the logical volumes would be presented to the OS as generic mass storage devices.
I think this could have a real market; while the bus would certainly be a limitation in performance (perhaps 1394b would help), it:
* Wouldn't require a massive case with internal bays and power taps for the drives. (S)ATA RAID is cheap, but scaling beyond 3 or 4 drives is a huge challenge in all but the biggest cases. Using external connectors like 1394/USB2 would solve this easily.
* Wouldn't require any drivers beyond existing USB/1394 generic mass storage support. Yes, you would need a special application to configure the hub's logical volumes or to perform stupid RAID tricks, but beyond that you wouldn't.
* Portability to other systems, either in the event of a host failure or, since it doesn't require drivers and once configured, it could be moved to another platform that only supported the generic mass storage device.
* OK, speed would suck, but it's about adding big, reliable mass storage with a trivial interface, not about transfer rates. The hub could actually have distinct USB/1394 channels to individual ports, since it's not really a _real_ hub and the host OS wouldn't see the individual disks, just the defined logical volumes presented as mass storage devices.
I think this would be great for "backup" applications or other small-time/home user data warehousing (keeping your native DV-AVI files, DVD backups, CD backups, MP3 backups, yadda...) Tape is nice, but SDLT or LTO drives are expensive, as are the media. For $600 you can do better than half a terrabyte of RAID-5 disk, but you need almost an entire PC to house internal disks.
Given how cheap RAID cards are, I can't believe that merging RAID into a hub would be all that expensive, especially since you're actually removing a lot of the disk control logic from the controller.
Areca... (Score:2)
speaking of linux and raid (Score:2)
http://scst.sourceforge.net/
It lets you take direct storage(lvm, raid, plain disks) or files on the system and serve them out over fibre channel to clients. So you can take 4 sata disks of 200GB each, RAID5 that up and get 600GB usable space. Break that 600GB into ten 60GB partitions and serve that out, and you have absolutely failsafe storage for your systems. Windows systems can use any old supported(most are) fibre channel card($25 on ebay), plug into a linux box
Re:3ware me (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:3ware me (Score:2)
I guess that means someone in my neighborhood (near Mt Doug Park) is a slashdot troll.
Re:3ware me (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Related Question (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Related Question (Score:2)
Re:Related Question (Score:3, Insightful)
3) It can happen, believe me.
4) Home data can still be valuable and worth protecting.
5) Most of your data probably doesn't change that often, so DVDs would be fine. 100 DVDs can be had for around $50. That's not cheap for a student, but is
Re:Related Question (Score:2)
Frankly I don't see the need for the expense of hardware RAID for PVR type stuff. It was your main computer system and you were trying to wring every ounce of performance out if it, it might be worth it to you, but for PVR? I'd go with software.
Re:Related Question (Score:3, Interesting)
External enclosures can be had for less than $30 and 250GB drives are under $140 each. Is your data worth $340?
Re:Why would RAID require drivers? (Score:2)
Re:Why would RAID require drivers? (Score:2)
You answered my question, even though I couldn't phrase my question correctly.
I need to read up on RAID some more
Re:Why would RAID require drivers? (Score:2)
translate it from a i2c IO or something, I mean if a cheap $30 router can have web admin, so can a $200 RAID controller.
That said, in the absence of a driver, the raid should still 'work' by letting the OS use a default IDE driver.
But I understand the issues of reducing costs by moving some logic into drivers and leaving hardware less complex and error prone. Its just a balance.
Re:Comparison of Nine SATA RAID 5 Adapters (Score:2)
If you want RAID on Linux (SATA or otherwise) you use true hardware RAID if you can afford it or Linux software RAID if you can't. Why bother messing with that fake-RAID crap, even when Linux is supported?
Re:Comparison of Nine SATA RAID 5 Adapters (Score:2)
Even still, the article does explain that these three are not true hardware controllers and spends some time explaining what that means.
Re:Comparison of Nine SATA RAID 5 Adapters (Score:2, Offtopic)
In anything less than ideal conditions, which means pretty much anywhere where broadband is not a viable option, softmodems suck. You'll be lucky to manage a 28.8k connection. Hook up a hardware modem and suddenly you get a 53k connection.
But as for the software raid, what do you thinks happens in Windows? There is a driver that fools the config utils in Windows into thinking the array is one drive. What
Re:Comparison of Nine SATA RAID 5 Adapters (Score:4, Interesting)
I, personally, would completely avoid any card manufactured by Promise or Highpoint as I've had crap luck with them in the past. They're just not very good cards, imho. And I'm not talking about their performance in Linux. I'm talking their performance in general. They're crap by my estimation regardless of platform. After losing data on my Windows 2000 box becuase of a crappy Highpoint card, I'll never buy another.
Anyway, your assertions are not even germaine. You point to the problem with "trick-BIOS" software RAID cards, which have been around for years and are not exclusive to SATA-RAID. They are shit cards, period...have been from the day they were made. Most of the cards in this review, however, are true hardware based SATA-RAID cards.
And, again, they all are supported on Linux. 3Ware, for example, has been a bastion of Linux support for ages.
As for the whole winmodem issue, who cares? What has it to do with a freaking troll blathering incorrectly about Linux not supporting SATA-RAID cards? Besides, the fact is, winmodems are NOT real modems. They're telecom interfaces, but not modems. You need software to make them modems. And I'm not talking about driver software to give access to the cards' functions. I'm talking software that has to implement the modem functionality itself...because the modem functionality doesn't exist on the "winmodem"...because it's not really a modem. Just because we now have linmodems.org and such to provide that software, it doesn't automagically make them "real" modems.
Tekram in the US (Score:2)
ARC-1110 [scsi4me.com]