[ILUG] Query regarding LSI Sata Raid and Debian

[Gareth Eason]

	Will it allow you to expand a RAID5 array? If so, it must be doing 
something clever(tm)

	Regards,
	-->Gar


John Coleman wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I've been mulling over which raid card to buy for the last few months
> and I've pretty much decided on the LSI Megaraid Sata 150-6
> It's a 6-port SATA controller with an onboard Intel XOR engine and
> supports online array migration and enlargement.
> As far as I know, using the AMI Megaraid SCSI driver in the kernel,
> the card presents itself as a standard SCSI drive. The card firmware
> takes care of container creation etc.
> One thing I'm curious about is monitoring SMART data on the sata drives.
> As it presents as a SCSI device, does anyone know if the card
> represents each physical sata disk as a LUN?
> As far as I know, smartctrl can (or should?:) read the smart data from
> LUN drives.
> 
> I'll be mating the card with 3x Hitachi Deskstar 250Gig sata drives at
> first, and buying more as funds allow. It will be a straight RAID5
> array, perhaps with one hot-spare. XFS fileformat, bsd-ftpd.
> I'm also purchasing the Battery back-up module.
> 
> Aside from questions as to why I need this much storage, does anyone
> have any comments or caveats I should be aware of?
> 
> I've looked at 3Ware kit, the 9xxx cards sound nice, but from what
> I've heard the raid5 write performance hasn't been improved much and
> they cost a hell of alot more than I can afford.
> If anyone has any benchmarks to the contrary, I'd like to hear them :)
> 
> I'll be ordering the card on Monday.
>