I'll be waiting for the drives that can send/receive at 3Gb/s!

As long as Adaptec don't publish the source code of the drivers it's as useless for the typical linux user as the half baked semi-Raid hardware in today's desktop.

Anytime you want to upgrade your Linux machine you are stuck waiting for Adaptec to catch up with it's driver development and compile.

If you are a linux user then go with 3Ware

http://www.3ware.com/products/serial_ata2-9650.asp

3ware publishes the drivers in sourcecode form, which makes it easy for you to use them on any linux version or kernel and they are also integrated (because of the availability of the sourcecode) in CentOS, RHEL, ... distributions.

And I bet they STILL won't release technical information so that you can actually write a driver for the bloody thing!

...after all the hassle of trying to get Windows, Linux and Solaris to use the same RAID controller (and discs!), I've long been an advocate that hardware-based RAID is unbeatable. Software-based RAID is quite simply, half-baked and unfinished.

Oliver.

I've been using the XFX Revo 64 now for well over a year. £20-30 hardware raid card, doesn't require any drivers on windows or linux (It just pretends to be a single standard IDE device). Works flawlessly.

http://www.xfxforce.com/web/product/listGenerations.jspa?generationId=65&categoryId=3

When you sell hardware RAID solutions, it must be hard to accept that free open source software RAID solutions exist, and that have much better data integrity.

Black boxes, move over, ZFS is here.

http://breden.org.uk/2008/03/02/a-home-fileserver-using-zfs/

Isn't this device _hardware_ RAID? i.e. totally transparent to the OS. So no need for the Linux fraternity to beaver away writing drivers etc. Not unless you want to that is.

This one is supposed to have ditched the sw raid which means it doesn't need drivers...

I can't quite beleive that the XFX card is a hardware raid at that price.

Software RAID sucks but hardware has it's problems too - you become tied to the hardware card instead.

...believe it or not hardware needs drivers ...

but adaptec gear has worked ok for me so far without needing any additional software on Linux.

RAID 0, 1, or 10 - bah

RAID 0 lose a drive lose all your data

RAID 1 - a good backup is better - more cost effective and you can (in concept) recover [many?] previous versions of your data.

RAID 10 - at least if you lose a drive you dont lose all your data.

If your doing Hardware RAID - and NOT using RAID 3, 5 or "higher" you are

spinning your own platters.

Great, looked in lots of common UK e-shops and none of them list XFX Revo64.

It's as if it doesn't exist.

Good thing: they ditched the stupid software RAID, or "fakeraid" as they call them in some places. I hope more manufacturers take this path instead of doing the same stupid Winmodem fiasco all over again.

Bad thing: This thingy doesn't support RAID 5. Which means I'll have to pass on this one :(

ummm the XFX card cost more like 200$ from what I can see online... and at that price I'd rather get a HighPoint RocketRAID2314MS for 200$ and do real Raid 5.

Adaptec makes hardcore rock-solid RAID controllers that more or less look like SCSI cards to an OS. 78xx & 79xx require a driver module. So does 3Ware, so does Intel or AMD or Nvidia or VIA or SiS disk controllers. The work is done in the hardware even though a driver is required.

Software RAID off-loads the calculations to the CPU.

What exactly are all you people disputing about?

You sound like a typical home user who hasn't thought of enterprise requirements, or maybe you just figure that bigger is better.

RAID is not an alternative to backups, they deal with different problems. If your service must be highly available you need redundant hot-swappable hardware to survive hardware failure (in this case a disk). Backups mean nothing if you lose business because of downtime. RAID cannot replace backups either. If you notice you accidentally deleted something a month ago RAID won't help you.

RAID10 is the only viable option for high performance systems, especially where lots of writes are involved. I'd only consider RAID5 or 6 where performance is not a major consideration, such as HD based backups.

There is an open source driver for Linux from Adaptec. They have one that supports all their RAID cards in the Linux kernel since 2.4.2. More info on that is available under http://www.adaptec.com/en-us/_common/linux