Well I just installed a couple of new serial ata hard drives on an old linux box to make a little storage server. I didn’t want a windows file server so I put SUSE 10 on it. Because I was using old hardware with new SATA hard drives I had to find a PCI card that would work with linux. I had lots of luck with suse on old hardware or any hardware for that matter so I figured I could just go to compusa and buy one of the compusa brand sata pci cards. That thing didn’t even work on windows. So I took that back and ordered one from newegg.com. I was a little worried that I would have the same experiance with this one as I did with the compusa card. I read from other users posts on newegg that one guy didn’t have any problems using it on linux so I ordered that one. This card was pretty cheap. I only had two large hard drives so I was only going to do raid 0 striping so I figured a cheap card that I could just do software raid on would work fine. I personally didn’t think I needed a fancy card that could do real hardware raid.
I plugged the card in, went into the raid bios and configured the raid at the bios level, then installed a fresh copy of suse 10 and used the partitioning util to do some software raid. Everything worked perfectly. Not one hang up. I figured I would make the raid partition ext3 because I believe it can handle LFS or larger files bigger than 2 Gigs without problem. Suse seems to default the filesystem to reiserfs. I think XFS would work well also for handling files that are large. Anyway I just wanted to post this because I couldn’t find any tutorials or articles about anyone using a pci serial ata card on linux and have it work.
Anyways here’s the link to the card: Koutech PSA150 PCI SATA Dual Channel Host Controller Card RAID 0/1 I used. If anyone needs more info or help, let me know, I’d be happy to share more.
no comments