CentOS - Dec 2013 - Third-party SATA-RAID cards suggestions

Hi all,

Would anybody care to suggest a third party SATA-RAID card that works out of 
the box with CentOS 6, without having to jump through hoops to make it work?

The card should preferably be able to connect ten harddrives, but I guess 
three four-port cards should work as well. There's no need for anything
fancy
really, as long as I can create a single big software-raid on it at CentOS 
install-time.

So far I've tried a Highpoint RocketRAID 2740 and a LSI 9201-16i without too
much success.

Thanks for any suggestions in advance!

-- 
BW,
	Sorin
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On 12/5/2013 12:49 AM, Sorin Srbu wrote:
> Would anybody care to suggest a third party SATA-RAID card that works out
of
> the box with CentOS 6, without having to jump through hoops to make it
work?
>
> The card should preferably be able to connect ten harddrives, but I guess
> three four-port cards should work as well. There's no need for anything
fancy
> really, as long as I can create a single big software-raid on it at CentOS
> install-time.
10 hard drives should be plugged into a SAS backplane, even if they are 
SATA drives, and driven by a SAS controller, using a 4 channel SAS 
cable.  anything else is ghetto.

you said RAID card, then you talk about JBOD?   which is it.

the LSI SAS 920x family should work just fine at this.   if it didn't 
you got cabling problems.

at centos install time, you don't create a single big software raid out 
of anything, you create mirrors for your OS root and /boot file systems, 
then after the system is running, you create your big raid 10 or 
whatever as your data volume, make that LVM, put /home and /var on it if 
you want, whatever.






-- 
john r pierce                                      37N 122W
somewhere on the middle of the left coast

On 12/05/2013 09:49 PM, Sorin Srbu wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Would anybody care to suggest a third party SATA-RAID card that works out
of
> the box with CentOS 6, without having to jump through hoops to make it
work?
>
> The card should preferably be able to connect ten harddrives, but I guess
> three four-port cards should work as well. There's no need for anything
fancy
> really, as long as I can create a single big software-raid on it at CentOS
> install-time.
>
> So far I've tried a Highpoint RocketRAID 2740 and a LSI 9201-16i
without too
> much success.
I have two servers with various RocketRaid cards installed - you do have 
to jump some hoops to make them work but they seem to work just fine 
once set up properly - you need to recompile/link for every kernel 
update - I have a script that I run to make it painless (YMMV).
Feel free to contact me off list if you want a copy of my setup notes.
You may also want to check epel repo, I recall they had some kmod setup 
for some of these cards.
>
> Thanks for any suggestions in advance!
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> CentOS mailing list
> CentOS at centos.org
> http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos

On 2013-12-05, Sorin Srbu <Sorin.Srbu at orgfarm.uu.se>
wrote:
> Would anybody care to suggest a third party SATA-RAID card that works out
of
> the box with CentOS 6, without having to jump through hoops to make it
work?
>
> The card should preferably be able to connect ten harddrives, but I guess 
> three four-port cards should work as well. There's no need for anything
fancy
> really, as long as I can create a single big software-raid on it at CentOS 
> install-time.
There's little reason to do that if you have a real hardware RAID card.
(I won't say "no reason", but it would have to be extremely
compelling
for it to be wise to go that route.)
> So far I've tried a Highpoint RocketRAID 2740 and a LSI 9201-16i
without too
> much success.
The MegaRAID 9271 works OOTB with CentOS 6.4.  Every 3ware card (also
from LSI) I've used also works OOTB with CentOS.  If you are new to
hardware RAID, the 3ware interface is a lot easier to learn than the
MegaRAID's.  (I suspect that other LSI cards, including the 9201, work
fine with CentOS too; perhaps you can post your error messages so we can
see what's wrong, instead of replacing a working controller.)

-- 
kkeller at wombat.san-francisco.ca.us

Keith Keller wrote:
> On 2013-12-05, Sorin Srbu <Sorin.Srbu at orgfarm.uu.se> wrote:
>> Would anybody care to suggest a third party SATA-RAID card that works
out of  the box with CentOS 6, without having to jump through hoops to
make it
>> work?
>>
>> The card should preferably be able to connect ten harddrives, but I
guess three four-port cards should work as well. There's no need for
anything
>> fancy really, as long as I can create a single big software-raid on it
at CentOS install-time.
>
> There's little reason to do that if you have a real hardware RAID card.
(I won't say "no reason", but it would have to be extremely
compelling
for it to be wise to go that route.)
>
>> So far I've tried a Highpoint RocketRAID 2740 and a LSI 9201-16i
without too much success.
>
> The MegaRAID 9271 works OOTB with CentOS 6.4.  Every 3ware card (also
from LSI) I've used also works OOTB with CentOS.  If you are new to
hardware RAID, the 3ware interface is a lot easier to learn than the
MegaRAID's.  (I suspect that other LSI cards, including the 9201, work
fine with CentOS too; perhaps you can post your error messages so we can
see what's wrong, instead of replacing a working controller.)

I tried to respond to this earlier, but *%@#$%^& manitou blocked me again.

I wouldn't recommend the RocketRaid. We have a few of them here; they work
ok, but Highpoint, who makes them, are *not* really great about updating
drivers once the card's out their door. The last one we put back into
service, I had to find the last source code they had for that card,
several years old, and then fix the code before I could compile it. (At
least it was in C).

Second on MegaRAID. The ones we have here are the Dell rebranded PERCs,
and we've never had trouble, except with ones nearly 10 years old.

        mark