Anyone have any recommendations or first hand experience with any good cheap PCI to ATA IDE cards? Im looking for one to throw in one of my systems to handle 2 WD 80GB IDE hard drives.. It would be nice if it was cheap. Looking for it to be compatible with Fedora Core 3 (2.6.9 kernel). Any recommendations or brands/models to stay away from would be good.

The promise fasttracks card have always worked for me. There are raid and non-raid versions depending on what your looking for.

http://www.newegg.com/app/manufact.a...log=410&DEPA=0

This one also comes in some maxtor hard drive boxes

Have somewhat similar question.
Wish to create a RAID 5 array system with three to four "fast" ATA-133 hdd's and get controller-optimized speed.
System is ATX desktop system w/ AMD 2000+ MHz CPU, 512+MB RAM, and three to four WD1200 7200rpm hdd's.

Am looking into getting two Highpoint RocketRAID 133's PCI controller's (each w/ native RAID 0, RAID 1, and RAID 0+1 support).
Each controller would have two separate channels and two controller would presumably have four separate channels for creating the RAID 5 array's parity set.

Anyone with experience or ideas on doing this?

Apparently, both SUSE and and RH/Fedora recognize the RocketRAID 133 cards.

Can obtain two PCI RocketRAID 133 controllercards for much less than the high-end RAID 5 single cards that Promise and Highpoint make.
Would set RAID 5 arrays on this system as a software/mdX array, unless someone has a compelling reason and source for making these HW-based.

Thanks for whatever help anyone could provide on this.

-nycace36

Highpoint and Promise controllers are software RAID. Also their RAID 5 controller versions are still software RAID. I suggest using an hardware RAID controller from 3ware. I do not suggest using software RAID for level 5 because it takes a lot processing power to handle read and write transactions. A dual processor system should be used if you want to use software RAID level 5. Linux software RAID is better than the controller's software RAID.

Thanks for speedy reply!
Have done a little bit of homework on this (stress the _little_ )

Highpoint's, Promise's, and 3X's upper-end controllers all seem to run into the USD$100's. Dual-processing systems can easily add much more USD$$'s and OS/CPU processing req's to this cost RAID is a Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks, not a Redundant Array of Expensive CPU's+controller, yes!?
Two identical lower-end Highpoint controller's as mentioned above TOGETHER(!) cost less than USD$100.

Reviewed a bit of the PCGuide's RAID 5 info
(http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/perf/...gle_Level5.htm)
and it pretty much agrees with what you write.
IMHO, main reason to do a RAID 5 system would be to have good fault-tolerance with three ATA133 drives at low-cost, even with much lower performance from SW-RAID system.

Question is in having one controller with this "hardware" RAID 0+1 level, or in having two such controller's set up into a low-level (but real) software RAID 5; which is really better in terms of fault tolerance at lowcost (even w/ terrible performance) ??

Seems from reading PCGuide's RAID info, that having two cheap add-on PCI controllers available with on-card BIOS chips would actually allow for slightly better performance w/ an OS-managed SW setup in my own scenario than one controller, no?
Two PCI ATA133 controller's would allow for four separately processed channels for making a RAID 5 array with one or two extra "master-jumpered" striped disks (making a total of 3-4 disks on array)
Even with one disk on each of the two controllers, duplexing fault-tolerance would be better (a little faster?) than mirroring fault-tolerance, the latter with only one PCI controller card..

-nycace36

Just to add to previous post, read a little bit through The Linux Documentation Project's Software-RAID HOWTO page at http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Software-RAID-HOWTO.html

In terms of some added performance in a possible RAID 5, section 6.8 "RAID-5" at http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Software-R...O-5.html#ss5.8
hints at a good optimization for ATA133 drives :
/dev/hda: Built-in controller ("Primary") for CD-ROM OS installations and updates
/dev/hdc: Built-in controller ("Secondary") for one of RAID 5 array ATA133 disks
/dev/hde: Added PCI controller (1st card) for sole-controller-processing of second RAID 5 ATA133 disk
/dev/hdg: Added PCI controller card (2nd card) for sole-controller-processing of third RAID 5 ATA133 disk

The first /dev/hda CD-ROM drive can be unmounted and physically disconnected from its controller slot once OS installed and RAID set up and functional.
Fourth and fifth identical ATA133 disks can be kept available to be what I believe are called "cold spares"

Anybody have such a RAID configuration working and optimized ??

TY for help on this!

-nycace36