RE: [OT] VERY STUPID RAID QUESTION!

["Ian Lowe" <ian@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

-----Original Message-----
From: Hawes,Timothy Edward (GEG) [mailto:haweste@xxxxxxx]
>
>Didn't someone have a *really* bad experience with a Highpoint
RocketRaid >card not so long ago ?  Ian ?

Yep.

If you take one bit of advice from the list...

For the love of all that's holy don't touch highpoint raid cards with a
forty foot stick.

Seriously.

I have seen more lost data with those damn things than any other bit of
hardware. As well as my own disaster when the red hat drivers for the
404 rocket Raid card borked it's guts up, I have just finished fixing an
SBS 2000 environment where *again* a single disk failing wiped out the
whole array.

Thankfully, in that case, I had already advised the customer to run
wildly in another direction, and they were therefore carrying out
backups every four hours until we could get the downtime to rip the
thing out and throw it away.

I am *amazed* that there hasn't been a class action lawsuit against
Highpoint, as to be blunt, I have not seen a single reliable component
they have produced - in every case, heavily loading a PC results in data
loss or corruption - the HPT370 controller in particular. I copied a
divx movie from back and forth from one disk to another on an HPT370
controller as an example. Each copy, the video picked up obvious
artefacts until by copy four, it was unable to play - an absolutely
ridiculous error rate, even more so when the controller quite happily
informed windows that all was well.

For huge disk installations, I would use Promise Controller cards - I
have yet to have an issue with one, and rather than hardware raid, I'd
be using Window's built in mirroring.

If on Linux, I'd be taking a good look at your filesystem. Ext3 is a
ticking timebomb in my experience, but your mileage may vary.

No matter what you choose, one golden rule - if you are not happy to
lose it, BACKUP!!

I.