[ILUG] Hardware RAID controllers under Debian

[Cian Davis]

> The clue is in the name, its an LSI card, not an adaptec one.
> And it is supported by the megaraid2 driver.

I figured that but couldn't be sure that it was supported. Also, apt wasn't
coming up with the megaraid2 driver. modprobe succeded on megaraid but 
not megaraid2.

>>/ The Adaptec card claims to support Online Capacity Expansion. I'm taking
/>>/ this to mean I can extend the size of a RAID 5 volume (for instance) but
/>>/ I can't get any detailed help on it without buying the damn card. Am I
/>>/ wrong about this idea?
/
> Again, its not adaptec, but yes it can do it. There is barely a 
> controller that
> cannot these days, a real array controller I'm talking about :-0

> You need to choose your filesystem well, do you need online expansion of not?

Online expansion would be *really* nice. The idea is that I'd like to but
a RAID 5 array now with about a terabyte/terabyte and a half but the group is
likely to expand and people are likely to use this to store all sorts
of crap. All the disks will be 1 array, which will be mounted as /home. If
in a years time we're running out of space and can chuck an extra disk or 2 in,
we could reduce the cost now by not buying disks we don't need.

I was reading the LSI manual and it was on about virtual disks and I got the 
impression that it was more dynamic resizing and not being able to buy more
disks and tack them onto an array.

The array will be connected to a server running Sarge, which is master node
for a cluster of 9 machines. I will be NFS mounting /home to the other 8 servers
and will also use the array so that people can rsync their work to it for
backup.

Regards,
Cian