Topic: IDE (ATA) RAID

[Cory]

Hello,

Does anyone have any experience with running hardware raid cards under E-Smith? If so which ones work out of the box? Which ones allow you to monitor the status of the RAID (check to make sure all driver are working, etC)...

Here are some I've looked at but can't figure out if they work or not:

3ware Escalade 7000-2 ATA RAID PCI
http://www.pricegrabber.com/search_getprod.php/masterid=649998/search=3ware/ut=0c9655623d6109da

FastTrak100 TX2 Ultra ATA/100 RAID Card
http://www.pricegrabber.com/search_getprod.php/masterid=419820/search=Promise%2520FastTrak%2520100%2520TX2/ut=0c9655623d6109da

Any advice, experiences are welcome.

Thanks in advance.

-Cory

[Tom Keiser]

I've had experience with the 3ware card, but not the FastTrak. Both offer some limited source code, but my experience with compiling IDE raid drivers for SME has not been happy.

The 3ware card works out of the box with a "generic" form of driver that is included with SME. 3Ware's downloadable CLI also works OK "sort of" in that it will give you a command line raid status report, but issuing command line commands to the raid card will not work.

FastTrak does not appear to include a monitor program, and its driver is specifically for kernel 2.4.18-3, so it will not work with SME 5.6. You may be able to compile the driver, though.

The 3ware CLI and also Web interface (3DM) are not kernel specific, but they are driver-specific, so you need a working driver. As SME chose to use a kernel that is not standard RedHat, you must download a driver from source and compile it, then download the utilities that go with that driver.  If you get a working driver, I'd love to have it.  http://www.3ware.com/support/download.asp?code=4&os=Linux

Hope this helps.

Tom Keiser

[Charlie Brady]

Tom Keiser wrote:

> As SME chose to use a kernel that is not standard
> RedHat, you must download a driver from source and compile
> it, then download the utilities that go with that driver.

SME *does* use a standard RedHat kernel - provided by and *recommended by* RedHat at the time we chose it.


Regards

Charlie

[Tom Keiser]

Charlie wrote: SME *does* use a standard RedHat kernel - provided by and *recommended by* RedHat at the time we chose it.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Yes, I'm sure that's right. However, the hardware vendors used the "really" standard kernel when creating binaries of their drivers. If you try to run a 3ware driver designed for RH 7.3 on SME 5.6, it won't load, saying "wrong kernel".

[Ray Mitchell]

It would also be good to look at Red Hat hardware compatibility at
http://hardware.redhat.com/hcl/?pagename=hcl&view=allhardware#form

Regards
Ray

[Shad Lords]

If you know what you are doing, I have the latest 3ware drivers and utilities on my website.  They are compiled for 5.6 and work great.  CLI commands work and 3dm is also fully functional.  These drivers have been tested with 6000,7000 and 8000 series cards in both UP and SMP configurations.

http://lordsfam.net/downloads/production/3ware/

The ony thing I have done besides download the packages from 3ware are to compile the main kernel drivers and stick them in the driver directory.

-Shad

[Tom Keiser]

Thanks, Shad. I'll try your stuff later today. I assume it will work, and thank you for doing all of us a great service!

Regards,

Tom

[Darren P]

how out of the box do you want i use an araid 1000 hardware raid device requires no drivers at all. but they are abit pricy i.e direct you can get a sample from www.accordance.com.tw for about $200 us plus import and delivery or you can get one for about $350 from a us supplier (just lookup araid 1000 in google)

Hope this may be some use to you

[Tom Keiser]

Shad Lords wrote:

>If you know what you are doing, I have the latest 3ware drivers and
>utilities on my website.  They are compiled for 5.6 and work great.

I downloaded and tried them, but got a kernel-mismatch error. Perhaps I didn't get the right files from your server. Pls see the note I posted in your forum re: 3ware.

Thanks,

Tom

[Shad Lords]

If you download the drivers from my site for the 3ware card, make sure you download the drivers from the drivers directory.  The tarball is the exact same one you download from 3ware site.  The drivers directory contains the source that has been extracted and compiled.

-Shad