pci-e hardware raid controller

[Vu Pham]

On Tue, 2007-06-05 at 10:06 -0500, C M Reinehr wrote:
> On Tuesday 05 June 2007 08:50, Vu Pham wrote:
> > I am looking for a sata pci-e *hardware* raid controller for Linux
> > ( Suse 10.2 ). I mean the one that the Linux OS can see the whole raid
> > system as one physical drive.
> >
> > This one will be use as a raid-0 with 4 SATA drives.
> >
> > Any recommendation ?
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > Vu
> 
> Generally, when someone asks for help with a problem or information on a 
> product, I dislike receiving replies suggesting a different product. But, now 
> I'm going to do it. Why would you want to spend money to buy and additional 
> single point of failure, when you could accomplish the same thing for free 
> with LVM2 (logical volume management)?
> 
> (Sorry, but I just couldn't help myself.)
> 

No problem, all advice ( and critics ) are welcome :)

There are two reasons:

1. this is a test system for coding and I would like to have the highest
disk access performance as much as possible, and I think the hardware
raid is faster than software raid. Or is the gain so small to afford a
hardware raid ?

2. With LVM, Linux will save the lvm configuration somewhere on disk and
to fully restore the whole system, you have to prepare a similar lvm
configuration in advance, right ? If I am only able to restore to a
single disk, will the restore work ? I 've tried LVM only one or twice
long time ago, so I think I am pretty much wrong on this.


Vu