LSI MegaRAID i4 UltraATA/100 controller

[Christopher Chan]

Liam Proven wrote:
> 2009/6/8 Chan Chung Hang Christopher <christopher.chan at bradbury.edu.hk>:
>   
>> Liam Proven wrote:
>>     
>>> Anyone using one of these?
>>>
>>> I'm trying to install Ubuntu Server on a Dell PowerEdge 600SC which
>>> has 6 x 80GB EIDE disks controlled by a Dell PERC/CERC ATA100 RAID
>>> controller, which is a rebadged ALI MegaRAID i4.
>>>
>>>       
>> ah...one of them pieces of hardware raid rubbish that use the i960 chip
>> from Intel. Looses to software raid in performance, especially raid5,
>> even a decade ago.
>>     
>
> Yes, it's an i960. But rubbish? Really? I thought I had scored a nice
> freebie here!
>
>   
Sorry Liam, but you've got something that loses big time to an AMD Duron 
box running software raid and even before that.

>>> The kernel finds it, but it can't see the logical disk on it, so setup
>>> barfs out. I've tried with Server 8.04.1 but an alt-install disk of
>>> 9.04 does the same thing.
>>>
>>> The odd thing is, this server used to run SME Server - a different
>>> Linux distro, based on Red Hat 7. Albeit, that was with mirrored 120GB
>>> drives. But still, it ought to work...
>>>
>>>
>>>       
>> Dunno...it is not fake-raid so it should not need a driver...but then
>> there are drivers for Redhat 8.0, Redhat 9 and so forth...
>>
>> http://www.lsi.com/obsolete/megaraid_i4_2541.html
>>     
>
> Exactly. The only change is, before, it was a RAID1, now it's a RAID5...
>
>   


Trust me. You are better off using it as a plain ide controller and 
using linux software raid for raid5. That piece of rubbish does not have 
the processing power necessary to do raid5. You could give it all the 
battery backed up cache in the world, 12GB in fact ( largest I have 
heard about :-P ), and it will still lose to software raid. Set it to 
jbod mode man.