Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:

> Or SATA. There are also some interesting IDE RAID cards from 3Ware and
> Adaptec, which may support real RAID operations and present the drives to
> the client as a single SCSI-appearing drive, but they do cost more than
> those poiece of half-a-neuron-shared-among-3-gerbils Promise or MegaRAID
> controllers.

That word "may" is disconcerting.

I'm trying to put together an eight drive system. I looked at the 3ware
9550SX, but it looks like it's not supported out of the box by any current
Redhat (RHEL, CentOS, Fedora). I'm not sure how I'd install if all disks
are on the controller in that case.

There's supposed to be some "install disk", but how does that fit into my
DHCP/PXE/NFS (ie. diskless) install process?

Frankly, at this point I'd be happy with a pointer to a cheap controller
that can handle eight SATA drives w/o any fancy RAID stuff. I'll deal with
that in software if necessary.

Anyone have suggestions?

I'd also be willing to pay a little more for real hardware RAID5, but (1) I
want to know that it is real hardware RAID5 <grin> and (2) it does need to
work out of the box with a Redhat (or I need to have some way to install
onto it with my network install process, if such a thing is possible).

Thanks...

Andrew