[plug] Promise 4chn ATA100 Raid controller

[Craig Ringer]

> Just wondering if anyone has had any experience (good or bad) using the Promise SX4000 ATA100 RAID5 Controller.  Looking at using one of these for a storage unit using 3 x 120GB drives.

No... but I can suggest one I know is good, the 3ware cards.

I had some initial (severe) problems, but those came down to a bad card 
- once it was replaced, all was happy. The card is fast (!!), 
well-supported under Linux, and firmware upgrades keep on adding new 
features. I got the ability to hot-add new arrays (instead of just 
hot-adding disks) in a firmware update. A guy I was talking to a while 
ago had a firmware upgrade add RAID 5 support to an older modle - it's 
hard to argue with that.

http://www.3ware.com/

I'm using the Escalade 8500-8 SATA RAID controller, and can definitely 
reccomend it. True hardware RAID with cheap (S)ATA drives is really 
nice. With SATA, you get the previously SCSI-only ability to hot-add and 
remove drives, so failures can be fixed on the fly - no server downtime. 
I thrashed this card really hard (since I had the first one faulty, I 
wanted to make sure I could trust my data to it) and couldn't find any 
serious fault with it. Unplugging drives during array verify, rebuild, 
heavy write access, etc was fine. Plug them back in and it rebuilds.

It's a bit disconcerting that it doesn't notice if you remove a drive 
until it tries to access it, but I can deal with that. When I got mine, 
there was also some documentation that REALLY needed to be better, but 
they should've fixed that by now. I certainly made enough noise about it.

Anyway, one of those cards is in our dual Xeon, which hosts the POST's 
mail (think regular 20mb messages, and more spam than most people ever 
see every day), 12 LTSP terminal users, and our big archival store. It's 
done a good job so far.

Craig Ringer