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Does anyone know of a product like this?

Yes, but you won't like the price generally, for the real plug and play units.

ACNC

Makes external boxes that you hook to a normal SCSI controller card, comes in the form of boxes that can take ATA drives, or SCSI drives. Also makes fibre channel boxes of a similar nature. Appears as one large SCSI drive to the host OS, compatible with basically any OS.

HardData

Same deal as ACNC basically, but is more of a VAR of AXUS products of this type. Penguin on homepage a plus.

Promise

Low end crappy standalone ATA-to-SCSI boxes, similar to the above ones, also makes very crappy contoller cards, only useful if you are using them for software RAID, don't use thier hardware RAID for anything. Promise cards are also picky about the BIOS on the motherboard they are installed on. Their standalone box prices are way overpriced for what you get. Their controller cards are cheap, but acceptable, for software RAID. More than one 6 channel controller per computer is not supported, more than three two channel cards is not supported. Linux kernel module is mature though.

3ware

3ware makes hardware ATA RAID controllers that are very fast, and relatively expensive. "Unlimited" number of controllers per computer, I've ran up to four 8-port cards in a single computer. Cabling is a mess when you get a lot of drives in a single system, if you need that many, seriously consider one of the above standalone boxes. Linux kernel module is open source and vendor maintained. Management software for Linux is free but closed source.

-----------------
Of course, Linux has software RAID built right in, and with a distro like Red Hat, you can set up software RAID when you install the OS in a simple GUI. You can use whatever disks you have installed, but for good results, you need to only have one disk per ATA channel, be it on your motherboard or a Promise card.

Something tells me he's not talking about IDE drives if he's building an array of 12 of them.

Look here. 12 IDE disks on one RAID controller.

I wonder if it can handle old drives, and behave as a simple IDE controller with all drives different. (At least RAID 0 or RAID 1 only needs 2 disks of same size -- or maybe waste some space on the larger drive)

Oh, here is more info in the FAQ.

• Some old drives are OK: "Escalade 7500 ATA RAID cards can be used with ATA/33, ATA/66, ATA/100, and ATA/133 disk drives."
• Ah, it can handle drives separately: "JBOD is an acronym for "Just a Bunch Of Drives".

Even RAID 1 (mirroring) will give you a performance boost according to this white paper. I'm using RAID 1 and I've noticed a difference. YMMV.

Even RAID 1 (mirroring) will give you a performance boost according to this white paper. I'm using RAID 1 and I've noticed a difference. YMMV.

I read several months ago that the escalade controllers were supporting the 48bit addressing for the >137GB drives. Check out www.3ware.com for more about the escalade controllers. I'd really like to get one. Too bad I don't have the $$ for the controller + drive.

I'm in the market for a new machine, and I've been spec'ing out different parts for my budget...These drives are nice and big, but what happens when you lose a 120 gig drive...I've pretty much decided that I'm going to have to get an IDE RAID card and highly recommend them...the RAID cards at work have saved me hours and hours of restoring from backup...Check out the 3ware Escalade, the Promise SuperTrak, or the Adaptec 2400A. RAID 5 is the way to go (with or without removable drives). I've been watching the prices for 120 Gig drives drop and now it's just about the price where I can afford to spend 150 clams to buy an extra drive that would be used to protect myself from a drive failure.

- grunby

The following pages provide information about ATA RAID and hot swapping:

• Adaptec 2400A - FAQ

  It supports online capacity expansion, hot-spare and hot-swap (chassis required), and all major operating systems.

• 3Ware 7500-series controller - Datasheet
• 3Ware ATA Drive Cage - Product Specs
• Promise SuperTrack SX6000 - Datasheet

The following pages provide information about ATA RAID and hot swapping:

• Adaptec 2400A - FAQ

  It supports online capacity expansion, hot-spare and hot-swap (chassis required), and all major operating systems.

• 3Ware 7500-series controller - Datasheet
• 3Ware ATA Drive Cage - Product Specs
• Promise SuperTrack SX6000 - Datasheet

Oh, and it has to be said: It runs Linux! They officially support Red Hat and SuSE, but the driver is a kernel module for Linux 2.2 and better.

Check out the faq.

There are Windows drivers, Linux drivers, and the FreeBSD kernel also has a driver (twe) for it too. You can also find the management software for FreeBSD, though not through 3ware.

I just want to second this.

3Ware makes several raid cards, 2way, 4way, and 8way. I have installed two 2ways and 1 4way in the recent servers I have built.

They are very easy to configure and look just like scsi hard drives on linux. Yeah, I know this is a widows question.

The 4 and 8 way card are also on standard sized PCI cards, unlike ATI. Watch out for cards that require a server case becuase they are extra long.

They are also cheaper then most of other cards.

I hunted all over the net looking for benchmarks of SCSI systems versus IDE systems, and couldn't find a damn thing. Sure, people benchmark SCSI hard drives versus IDE hard drives, but nobody ever bothers to benchmark SCSI RAID versus IDE RAID.

I got so sick of it I said what the hell, and ordered up a pair of raid arrays for doing my own tests.

Test system configuration:
Supermicro P4DP6 Mainboard with two Intel Xeon 2.2GHz processors, and 4GB of memory.
Microsoft Windows 2000 Server

No I did not have time to test this under Linux before I had to get these bad boys ready for prouction. I doubt the benchmark results would have been much different, I've seen 3Ware running under Linux at Linuxworld and they kick some serious ass.

IDE setup:
3Ware Escalade 7450 Raid Controller
Three Seagate Barracuda ATA IV Drives (7200RPM 9.5ms access time)
This was set up in a RAID5 configuration.

SCSI Setup:
Mylex AcceleRAID 352 Raid Controller
Three Seagate Cheetah LVD160 Drives (15,000RPM 3.6ms access time)
This was also set up in a RAID5 configuration.

Benchmarking utility used:
HD Tach 2.52

Here's the bottom line I got out of my benchmark tests.

SCSI Performance
CPU Usage: 2.1%, Access time 6.1ms
Read Speed: Max 37.6MB/s Min 11.6MB/s Avg 30.8MB/s
Write Speed: Max 8.5MB/S Min 5.4 MB/s Avg 7.5 MB/s

IDE Performance
CPU Usage: 3.1%, Access time 14.2ms
Read Speed: Max 31.8MB/s Min 4.3 MB/S Avg 18.3MB/s
Write Speed: Max 48.7MB/s Min 12.3MB/s Avg 36.4MB/s

I was a bit shcoked to see the IDE do so well. It annihilated the SCSI in terms of sheer write performance but lagged behind a bit from the read performance. CPU use isn't a factor for most people, who really cares if you lose 1% more of your CPU to the IDE compared to the SCSI.

Those 15,000 RPM drives were loud as jet engines, and they got hot enough that I was thinking of cooking some bacon strips on them. They were too hot to touch. The IDE drives on the other hand were barely audible even with the case off, and remained completely cool to the touch through the whole test without even a fan on them. You tell me which of those two types of drives is going to have a longer MTBF...

I didn't even use high performance IDE drives for that test. I'd also like to point out that the Mylex card was 66MHz/64bit, whereas the 3Ware card was 33MHz/64bit... so the 3Ware card was holding its own even though it was running at a slower rate of speed. I wonder what will happen in future generations of these controllers when they turn up the speed and improve the code...

Cost... I coul have built three of those IDE Raid systems for the price of that one SCSI system.

Space... The IDE drives were 80GB, the SCSI were 36GB. IDE owns SCSI in terms of space. We have some bigass databases where I work so that's actually fairly important to us.

Unless you REALLY need that 6.1ms access time or the extra ~20% in read performance you are far, far better off with an IDE Raid at this point.

The guys at Toms and Anandtech really need to do a major article on this stuff...

For the skeptical, here's a link to the screenshots of the HDTach benchmarks I ran. Be GENTLE guys we do not have tons of bandwidth for this...

IDE vs SCSI

IDE is on the top, SCSI is on the bottom. Interesting how SCSI is fairly linear but IDE is really sloppy and just running all over the place.

Where I work, I have had to set up a few RAID systems, and the solution that we decided to work with was entirely based on IDE hard drives.

Here is the solution I did recommend and implement (we are working with 120GB hard drives for now, but with the now available 160GB it can be a 1120 GB RAID) :

1) The Hard Drives : ~$1200 (1TB solution for $1600)
MAXTOR 120GB about ~$150 a piece ... 8 of them

2) 8 port Hardware RAID Controller: ~$900
3ware 7850 / ~$900
(This card is ATA133 compatible with 8 port Hot Swap/Hot spare independent ports and of course fully supported under Linux (kernel 2.4.18 is recommended))
(NB: we looked at the Promise solutions but preferred this solution over a SCSI Disk rack)

3) Case and Racks: $320
ENLIGHT 8950 / ~$160
(This case has 1x 3.5" floppy drive bay and 9x front 5.25" drive bays)
Removable HD Rack with Dual cooling Fans / 8x$20
(with ATA100 compatible cables)

4) Computer: old parts (new ... about ~$300)
Athlon 500 / 256MB / 20GB HD / NIC (no Monitor)

And works as we have about 4 of them with the solution presented here in different total HD size configurations.

3ware have been really nice about releasing Red Hat & SuSE Linux drivers (with source I think -- there's a src/ directory with a .tgz I haven't looked at) side by side Windows drivers. (Oddly, they don't bother with Mac drivers.)

3ware have been really nice about releasing Red Hat & SuSE Linux drivers (with source I think -- there's a src/ directory with a .tgz I haven't looked at) side by side Windows drivers. (Oddly, they don't bother with Mac drivers.)

• proven - which is why they're used in high-availability, fault-tolerant servers the world over-- oh, wait. That's SCSI. Can you hot-swap IDE? Without voiding your warranty?
• extremely fast - which is why the best-performing hard drives are IDE-- oh, wait, they're SCSI, too. For a fun experiment to do in your spare time, find me a 15k RPM IDE drive. Wait, no, find me just a 10k one. Oh, wait, no, find me simply a 7200 RPM IDE drive with 8MB of cache onboard.
• and a dime a dozen - Okay, you've got me, there.
• and IDE hardware can be had extremely cost effectively - It may be cheap, but is it cost-effective?

Actually, I also recommend 3ware cards if you have a lot of cheap IDE disks and can't afford to lose data. You can put together a terabyte of RAID 5 disk with 8 IDE drives and one 6810.

I also recommend backups. Lots and lots of backups.

- A.P.

Most IDE drive trays are NOT rated for hot swap, and neither are the controllers on the motherboard. To do ide hotswap the best way is an ide raid controller from either 3ware, Promise or Adaptec along with certified disk trays.

3jane:/shn 291891992 146780768 121759872 55% /store/shn
3jane:/mp3 116358328 64690856 42358808 60% /mp3

The first one is RAID 5, the second is crappy vinum-based RAID 0. The important stuff is all compressed losslessly with Shorten (SHN). The other stuff is MP3, encoded at 256+ Kbit/second. Everything gets played on another machine (Ultra 30) connected to my DJ system and a high-quality headphone amp (with either a pair of Senn 580s or a pair of ER-4Ss.

The only suggestion I have is to buy a real IDE RAID card and don't toss all your data on a single, non-mirrored disk. Also, make backups every once in a while.

- A.P.

We just bought a system that has a usable Terabyte of disk space and payed about $7500 for it.

We're using 10 Maxtor 130gig drives on 2 3ware 7510 Controllers. We could still put 6 more drives on the two controllers.

IBM drives (or the 75GXP series at least) support delayed spin up, with a jumper-setting. The snag is that the OS, BIOS, or controller card would have to send staggered 'start unit' commands (or maybe you could do it with hdparm or similar in user space for the non-boot drive). I had a similar problem (total current exceeded PSU's paper spec, but in practice over-current protection didn't kick in), and contacted 3ware's tech support, who said they'd put it on their wish list. No idea if they've implemented it in their new firmware, but might be worth checking it out. IBM detail the AT commands needed to start the unit in the drive docs..

Pretty much identical to my setup except I'm using a 3ware card to host the 4 drives. This allows me to run RAID 10 (striped/mirrored) and surface them all as a single SCSI drive. I can easily saturate and sustain 100Mb to/from the server with NFS and Samba.

Sweet.

I couldn't find any 3ware controller cards. I found only this: 3Ware.

Umm, maybe you haven't seen 3ware Escalade?

Forget the HPT36x and 37x controllers, as well as most Promise controllers, all the smarts is in the driver software and they suck performance-wise. High-end Adapted controller appear to be ok, but they are pricey compared to the 3ware controllers last time I looked.

One controller with one or two drives may be faster with SCSI, but dollar for dollar, 3ware and IDE walk all over them (particularly with database servers where you want a few spindles to minimize blocking seek activity.

3ware has discontinued their entire Escalade line. They are now focusing entirely on integrated storage systems.

3ware makes pure hardware based IDE RAID. Adaptec has one too.. But these aren't all that cheap. Adaptec is ~ $400 I think and the 3ware starts at $150 or so for a 2 port but goes up to $400 or more for an 8 port. The Promise cards are partially software based (some in hardware).

The nice thing with the 3ware (and I presume Adaptec) product is that it supports all the nifty stuff like hotswap.

Have you tried 3ware? They make IDE RAID cards that have linux driver support (in the 2.4 kernel). I'm not sure if their devices support the new 48bit LBA standard. They seem to be focusing more on their larger products but their RAID cards (which are used in their larger products so they shouldn't be going away any time soon) are here.

Promise has the FastTrak100 TX4 PCI that supposedly has four independent IDE channels (no slave/master crap, everything is master like 3ware products) so you have another option there with support for 48bit LBA in Promise drivers mentioned at linux-ide.org it sounds like a promising solution (no pun intended).

You could always put a couple Promise Ultra100's in there too - it sucks to waste PCI slots but with high end motherboards having onboard LAN, sound, etc I would expect that you have plenty of open slots. I've used both Promise Ultra/FastTrack products (with the kernel drivers, not Promises) and 3ware products and both are great.

From front page of linux-ide.org:
Leading the World to Announce Native 48bit LBA Support
Supporting Maxtor BIG DRIVE TECHNOLOGY
Releasing Support of new Promise Ultra 133 TX2 48bit HOST
Future Release Support of new Silicon Image's CMD 48bit HOST

Have you tried 3ware? They make IDE RAID cards that have linux driver support (in the 2.4 kernel). I'm not sure if their devices support the new 48bit LBA standard. They seem to be focusing more on their larger products but their RAID cards (which are used in their larger products so they shouldn't be going away any time soon) are here.

Promise has the FastTrak100 TX4 PCI that supposedly has four independent IDE channels (no slave/master crap, everything is master like 3ware products) so you have another option there with support for 48bit LBA in Promise drivers mentioned at linux-ide.org it sounds like a promising solution (no pun intended).

You could always put a couple Promise Ultra100's in there too - it sucks to waste PCI slots but with high end motherboards having onboard LAN, sound, etc I would expect that you have plenty of open slots. I've used both Promise Ultra/FastTrack products (with the kernel drivers, not Promises) and 3ware products and both are great.

From front page of linux-ide.org:
Leading the World to Announce Native 48bit LBA Support
Supporting Maxtor BIG DRIVE TECHNOLOGY
Releasing Support of new Promise Ultra 133 TX2 48bit HOST
Future Release Support of new Silicon Image's CMD 48bit HOST

I would say the only problem is support the 20+ Mac users, but after you get a friendly demeanor going, they're easy to get along with and actually start to solve their own problems.

Now I'm working on projects that are fun for me, that eventually Stone & Ward will see benifits from. Like playing with different Linux distros for an in-house webserver (that doubles as an Infiltration server :) Or building a RAS to take advantage of our 24 phone lines and 6mbit connection that don't get used after hours. I also have a planned network backup solution that uses an ATA RAID controller and a bunch of big hard drives. It would give them four months of hourly incremental backups.

~LoudMusic

1) Get:
- 1U 4bays rack mountable chassis from Sliger Designs
- 3WARE 6410 Escalade IDE controller (Choice of 0/1/0+1/5 Raid) on a 90 PCI riser card
- 4 x 75/100GB ATA100 drives (maybe DiamondMax)
- MicroATX mainboard with NIC and Video integrated on board (invest in RAM not in processing power - 750/850MHZ should be more than sufficient)
- Minimum Linux/*BSD OS booting from a read-only 16 to 64MB flash IDE device, loading kernel and a customised Ramdisk root filesystem, mounting Raid devices in R/W mode, starting SAMBA (and/or Netatalk).
A good starting point is Linux Bootdisk HOWTO

2) Choose 0+1 Raid and you get quick and completely redundant 150/200GB storage that can survive the full failure of one disk.

3) Want remote grafical managment from a standard web browser? Go for Webmin or SWAT.

One of the features in the product listed at the poster's first link, the 3ware RAID Drive Cage (RDC-300): "Compatible with ATA/100, 66, and 33"

If you want good hardware raid, get a 3ware board.

Get a motherboard with 4 IDE channels (most "raid versions" have this) and plug 12 drives into the Hotrods, 4 into the motherboard's raid channels, and 2 into the secondary ide channel. The boot hard drive goes on the primary ide channel.

Ouch! Spend a few hundred more, and get an Escalade Storage Switch. They perform very well and aren't wildly expensive (you should be able to have an 8-channel 32-bit, 33Mhz version for under $500.00). You also have your motherboard IDE channels free for things like DVD-ROM drives... heh heh... Lots of DVD-ROM drives... Heh heh...

Ahh, yes-- and there are Linux drivers available for the Escalade controllers. If you're looking for wild amounts of performance, they do have a 66Mhz, 64-bit PCI version available, too. Wowza.

Promise has their SuperTrak controller, which looks very interesting, but based on some messages I saw flying around on the Kernel List, apparently it's not as straightforward as just compiling in I2O support to use it under Linux. Grrr...

Check out this review and this review if you want to see how the Escalade stacked up to other "high end" IDE RAID controllers.

3Ware makes a nice SCSI/IDE RAID board that supports Linux w RAID 0,1,10 or 5 with hot spares. We are using it to support a couple of multi-hundred GB RAID5 servers using IDE drives no problem. You do want to make sure you download their very latest driver and firmware though.

In addition to the "ReiserFS absolutists" who know little about XFS, it seems we also have so "SCSI RAID absolutists" here who know little about 3Ware microcontroller-driven RAID controllers. So a little education is in order.

First off, most of the "dumb, BIOS-only" IDE RAID solutions do "suck." Since they are still just a "dumb" IDE controller, they still off-load computational and other details off to the CPU, which is still, ultimately, driving the drives. So they still inherit all the limitations of IDE, including the 128GB max addressing limitation. Worse yet, nearly all of these solutions allow more than one drive per channel with just kills performance (especially in the 4 drive, RAID-0/1 implementations).

Fortunately, 3Ware and a few select others have built real host adapter solutions, except they use IDE drives. With that small exception, they are almost exactly like more expensive, SCSI-based RAID controller solutions. They have an on-board microcontroller that not only off-loads all the computational details, but drives the IDE disks directly. As such, the 3Ware card, for all intents and purposes, is a SCSI controller from the OS' perspectively, including support for upto 2TB device sizes. The OS never sees the underlying hardware itself, which also allows these devices to emulate advanced SCSI features like command queuing, threading and even sector remapping.

The 3Ware Escalade 6000 series comes in 2, 4 and 8 channel versions, with one device per channel, at a cost of about $60/channel. 3Ware support is included in all the latest 2.2 and 2.4 kernels from most distros (and in most stock Linux kernel releases as well). Although Adaptec now has a similar, 4-channel product (that does RAID-5 as well?), I have not seen Linux support for it. In the near future, 3Ware plans on introducing a new product series with RAID-5 support (current Escalades can only do RAID-0, 1 or 0/1).

-- Bryan "TheBS" Smith

In addition to the "ReiserFS absolutists" who know little about XFS, it seems we also have so "SCSI RAID absolutists" here who know little about 3Ware microcontroller-driven RAID controllers. So a little education is in order.

First off, most of the "dumb, BIOS-only" IDE RAID solutions do "suck." Since they are still just a "dumb" IDE controller, they still off-load computational and other details off to the CPU, which is still, ultimately, driving the drives. So they still inherit all the limitations of IDE, including the 128GB max addressing limitation. Worse yet, nearly all of these solutions allow more than one drive per channel with just kills performance (especially in the 4 drive, RAID-0/1 implementations).

Fortunately, 3Ware and a few select others have built real host adapter solutions, except they use IDE drives. With that small exception, they are almost exactly like more expensive, SCSI-based RAID controller solutions. They have an on-board microcontroller that not only off-loads all the computational details, but drives the IDE disks directly. As such, the 3Ware card, for all intents and purposes, is a SCSI controller from the OS' perspectively, including support for upto 2TB device sizes. The OS never sees the underlying hardware itself, which also allows these devices to emulate advanced SCSI features like command queuing, threading and even sector remapping.

The 3Ware Escalade 6000 series comes in 2, 4 and 8 channel versions, with one device per channel, at a cost of about $60/channel. 3Ware support is included in all the latest 2.2 and 2.4 kernels from most distros (and in most stock Linux kernel releases as well). Although Adaptec now has a similar, 4-channel product (that does RAID-5 as well?), I have not seen Linux support for it. In the near future, 3Ware plans on introducing a new product series with RAID-5 support (current Escalades can only do RAID-0, 1 or 0/1).

-- Bryan "TheBS" Smith

Have you looked at 3Ware IDE RAID controllers. Excellent Linux/BSD support You'll find most dual mobo's have intel eepro's on them (support is okay under Linux) though you'll find many a thread under lkml where problems are attributed to eepro's. 3Com's 3C905C have support for hardware checksumming and zero-copy networking (incorporated in 2.4.4-pre6)

The best place I've found for information on the current state of this "Borg PC" is the AVSForum HTPC board. Some of the forum members have customized their PCs to a degree that comes pretty close. They aren't an every user, dumb down PC, but some come pretty close at being user friendly... The problem remains being the cost. The Gateway Destination came pretty close to bringing it all togheter, but it was underpowered, and very few people would pay for it (so it was discontinued)...

Some manufacturers are starting to come around and to provide automation features, that enable some customization (like ATI, which now has an API for remotes). Girder seems to be a great hub for programmability features, where several Open Source projects converge in controlling the HTPC.

A few general comments: * 560 GB of storage is almost affordable for personal use. Just use 8 80 GB HD with a RAID 5 controller (like the 3Ware 6800). It'd cost ~$2300, which isn't cheap, but you'd have plenty of storage, and you even get some redundancy...

* UltimateTV and the XBox are going this way. The XBox will be HDTV compatible, and future generations might include a HDTV tuner. And then using USB you might get additional funcitonality. A merging of UTB and XBox might also be possible. Probably the biggest objection would be that this is a MS solution...

* There at at least 3 HDTV PC Tuner cards available (Telemann HiPix, Hauppage WinTV-HD, and AccessDTV). All the manufacturers are working into building digital PVR functions into their products, which will make HDTV tuners a Tivo alternative (at least for OTA broadcasts).

* SnapStream is working to provide PVR features on your PC (there was another, but I don't have a name handy), and the company is very open to user feedback and open source development (as the IRTuner Project shows).

* Don't forget PDA's and mobile multimedia devices. As more multimedia is available, the box will make it accesible on the go, so you can take movies with you when you commute, or access music from anywhere in your house (using 802.11b) w/o requiring a PC or a full blown device, just your PDA. SnapStream recognizes the potential of PDAs, and is offering PocketPVS so you can transcode video and play it back on your PPC.

HDTV might be the catalyst that pushes the HTPC out of obscurity, and that creates the borg box. With every US household having to replace their TV in the next few years, more will start to consider cheap HDTV PC Tuners, using existing big screen displays and/or large screen Monitors (and VGA compatible TVs).

Ok, it's not that impressive, but we pretty much did it with off the shelf parts, and it was very cheap. 12x 75G 7200RPM IBM IDE drives, BX chipset board, redundant hot-swap power supplies, 1G ECC RAM, and 2x PIII-850, Kingston low-profile UDMA66 hot-swap enclosures, and 2 3Ware 6800 RAID controllers. In an ACME 5U case, with just 16 strips of 80mm x 15mm metal (with three holes drilled in each), as the custom hardware ;-)
I forget the exact cost (this was a few months ago), but it was under $10,000

Knock yourself out =)

Forget Promise, SIIG and others. 3Ware's Escalade series of products are just what you are looking for. Keys to performance with Escalade:

• On-board co-processor that acts like a SCSI target from the standpoint of the OS/driver. The same you'll find on most SCSI RAID controllers (i960 or similiar). This dedicated CPU drives your CPU, not your mainboard chipset's southbridge (which normally requires some CPU overhead even with bus mastering).
• One IDE drive per-channel. No "slave" issues. 100% Hot-Swap capability (although you'll need a IDE hot-swap bay/chassis for full hot-swap capability). Maximum performance.
• 2-8 channel boards, roughly $50-60/channel -- not much more than those crappy Promise FastTrak cards, only much, much faster.
• 100% Linux support. 3Ware controller support is built-in to most newer 2.2.x kernels.

If you want to minimize cost and performance, 3Ware's Escalade is what you want. Their new 6000-series offers 2-8 channels of RAID-0/1/1+0 with Ultra66 support for $139/279/479 (2/4/8 channel).

3Ware is also working on a 64-bit PCI board with RAID-5 support (as well as Ultra100). Be looking out for it (I know I will).

-- Bryan "TheBS" Smith

Forget Promise, SIIG and others. 3Ware's Escalade series of products are just what you are looking for. Keys to performance with Escalade:

• On-board co-processor that acts like a SCSI target from the standpoint of the OS/driver. The same you'll find on most SCSI RAID controllers (i960 or similiar). This dedicated CPU drives your CPU, not your mainboard chipset's southbridge (which normally requires some CPU overhead even with bus mastering).
• One IDE drive per-channel. No "slave" issues. 100% Hot-Swap capability (although you'll need a IDE hot-swap bay/chassis for full hot-swap capability). Maximum performance.
• 2-8 channel boards, roughly $50-60/channel -- not much more than those crappy Promise FastTrak cards, only much, much faster.
• 100% Linux support. 3Ware controller support is built-in to most newer 2.2.x kernels.

If you want to minimize cost and performance, 3Ware's Escalade is what you want. Their new 6000-series offers 2-8 channels of RAID-0/1/1+0 with Ultra66 support for $139/279/479 (2/4/8 channel).

3Ware is also working on a 64-bit PCI board with RAID-5 support (as well as Ultra100). Be looking out for it (I know I will).

-- Bryan "TheBS" Smith

I've been tempted to get some of the 3ware controllers. They've got support for Linux and FreeBSD and controllers that support up to 8 drives. I'd buy SCSI for everything in a minute if it was all affordable; it's waaayyyy too expensive, and for a lot of purposes clever solutions like the 3ware IDE RAID controller provide all the performance that some applications will ever need. They won't replace real SCSI or fiberchannel RAID but they do have a place.

First off, AVOID:

• The Promise FastTrak cards
• Mainboard BIOS RAID (same thing as the crappy Promise cards)
• Or more than 2 ATA drives in Software RAID if you need your CPU at all (too much CPU utilization).

Additionally, what you need to consider:

• PCI Throughput -- try putting your controller on its own PCI channel and go for 66MHz (or PCI64, but you'll need Linux 2.4 for 64-bit PCI) -- you'll need a more costly mainboard to do this, ones based on the ServerWorks (fka RCC) ServerSet chipsets come highly recommended. Otherwise, you'll easily saturate a traditional mainboard with a single PCI bus with a I/O rate that high.
• SCSI since you're going to need more than 2 stripped drives -- try ~8 Ultra160 drives stripped over 2-4 channels on a 66MHz PCI64 card. The new Mylex eXtremeRAID 2000 is such a 4-channel Ultra160 board with a powerful StrongARM 233MHz at the core (compared to whimpy i960 66-100MHz co-processors on other SCSI RAID controllers).
• If cost is a factor, look into a "Real" co-processing ATA RAID controller that acts like a SCSI disk/target like those from 3Ware (which has full Linux support). 3Ware's new 6000-series has Ultra66 support and claims >100MBps read speeds and upto 84MBps write speeds (I'm sure that's the 8-channel board with 8 disks stripped ;-).

-- Bryan "TheBS" Smith

You could check if the 3ware.com disk controller will work with removable media. It does RAID on multiple IDE drives, with separate IDE channels to each drive. It was in the Linux area at COMDEX.