[OT] Useable BIOS RAID 1 on the cheap?

[the hatter]

On Fri, 13 Jan 2006, Peter Corlett wrote:

> Steve Mynott <steve at tightrope.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> [...]
> > Is there anyway of doing hardware RAID on the cheap with those SATA
> > disks and a suitable motherboard which is actually likely to work
> > that anyone can recommend? A Shuttle-type form factor would be
> > particularly cool.
>
> All the cheap RAID controllers are software RAID. The BIOS has enough
> smarts to be able to boot Windows, at which point their Win32 driver
> takes over. Linux support for these is partial and experimental at
> best, but usually nonexistent.

Not entirely true, we'd been selling cheap SATA RAID in dedicated servers
to customers, both linux and windows for a good while.  It seems about
50:50 if you pick a cheap one at random (based on the comments from the
people who build the boot images whenever $vendor tried to ship something
new) possibly less if you're forced into using something that doesn't keep
very current (eg kernels for RHEL, especially a revision or two behind
current)

The one I hold here still in its box (which may bear some resemblance to
those which were in the office) says Manhatten Mercury PCI SATA 150 RAID
Controller Card and looks to have a Silicon Image chipset.


the hatter