Re: Experience with HP Smart Array P400 and SATA drives?

On Wed, 10 Dec 2008, Greg Smith wrote:
>> I'd be interested in recommendations for RAID cards for small SATA systems.
>> It's not anything to do with Postgres - I'm just intending to set up a
>> little four-drive array for my home computer, with cheap 1TB SATA drives.
>
> Then why are you thinking of RAID cards?  On a Linux only host, you might as
> well just get a standard cheap multi-port SATA card that's compatible with
> the OS, plug the four drives in, and run software RAID.  Anything else you
> put in the middle is going to add complications in terms of things like
> getting SMART error data from the drives, and the SW RAID will probably be
> faster too.
>
> A great source for checking Linux compatibility is
> http://linux-ata.org/driver-status.html

Thanks, that is the kind of info I was looking for. It looks like most
sensible SATA controller manufacturers are converging towards the open
ahci controller standard, which is useful.

Matthew

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