I have a PCI RocketRaid 404, which has the HighPoint 374 chip on it. The Suse9.0 Pro installation sees "thru" the controller and sees 4 hard drives, instead of one large drive.

Highpoint has SUSE 8.2 drivers, but they don't download properly. I remember having the same unresolved problem with this particular RAID controller using several other distros last year. Any suggestions of a fix for SUSE 9.0 Pro? Maybe i can find the source for the drivers...

Thx

From what I have been told, you are better off just using the software RAID stuff with those cards then the binary drivers provided by the manufacturers. The reason being, those aren't true hardware RAID chips (they rely on the driver to provide the RAID functionality, same with the promise chips) and the linux software RAID people do considerably more development then the few developers those companies assign to linux drivers.

If you are looking for a true IDE hardware RAID you need to get a 3ware card, there RAID drivers are in the kernel and they provide a true hardware RAID solution.

BTW... there is source code for that driver @ http://www.highpoint-tech.com/USA/brr404.htm

coo thx... i found the source code, and am "trying" to compile it right now. fortunately i have a box running the same distro that is nearly identical (same mobo etc, except no raid card/configuration. that should help me build a driver identical to the one needed?

i'll try to get the drivers to work, but will look @ hardware based Raid you mentioned (3ware). I'm guessing they would have slightly better performance in addition to native support.

well i just tried to make the driver from HighPoints latest source and got about 20 pages of errors. i'm pretty sure i have the supporting utils though they may be looking for older versions? not sure what the problem is...

i got the boot options to work (hde=noprobe hdf=noprobe etc etc x8) so it doesn't probe the controller. then switched to console 2 Ctrl+Alt+F2, mounted the floppy drive, copied the SUSE8.2 driver provided on HighPoint's website and tried insmod. it gave me an error: doesn't have GPL license, and a couple other errors. when i Ctrl+Alt+F7 back to the installation, it can't find the controller still.

any idea where i could find different sources for this controller?

any ideas in general?

checking on the 3ware web site, i notice they only have drivers through SUSE8.2 at least on the 7506-4LP which would work with my hardware. you mentioned the drivers are in the kernel for 3ware controllers. does this mean i will not really need any of their drivers anyway? or do i risk having the same problems as with HighPoint? maybe i should post a thread for PATA RAID controller with best native linux support...

Well, the deal with a real hardware raid adapter is technically speaking you shouldn't need drivers. Because as far as the operating system is concerned there is only one drive there, it writes and reads data to it as if that is the case, and the hardware takes care of the rest.

You would only need drivers to get the statistics and to manage the arrays. But you could also reboot and use the 3ware bios to manage arrays. 3ware does support linux well though, probably because there products aren't super expensive so they are popular in low price linux servers where people want data protection.

I will warn you though, 3wares newer products for SATA raid are 66Mhz. 64bit PCI cards.

ahh, thanks very much for the response. i hadn't really thought about the fact that a true hardware raid would not really need drivers. and i currently control the array on the 404 through bios, so really wouldn't need drivers anyway (our systems don't require 100% up time).

Is there a way to tell if you are not getting a true hardware raid controller from various vendors? The 404 was my first raid controller and i don't know a lot about them.