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I have an old P3 dual 1 Ghz workstation that I'd like to make into a server (file, login, print). The motherboard only has IDE support so I'm looking at a SATA RAID controller card (RAID 0 or 1) to work with Ubuntu or OpenSuse.
I second the software raid route - once you use a particular vendor's hardware raid solution, you may be locked into it, and the features (or lack of features) which that solution provides.
I've used a pair of non-RAID Promise SATA300 TX4 cards (PCI) to run 8 Seagate SATA II drives in a software RAID5 array, and they have worked very well. I don't know how their performance compares against other RAID5 setups, and it will vary widely based on a number of factors, but, just to have _something_ for comparison:
% hdparm -t /dev/md0
/dev/md0:
Timing buffered disk reads: 346 MB in 3.01 seconds = 114.90 MB/sec
I pretty much used all the default settings from the guides for setting up software raid (via the mdadm tool), and for creating the filesystem on md0. I don't know how much faster I might be able to make it go, but I don't really care, because it's fast enough for what I'm using it for - storing and playing my DVD collection, which only needs at most, 10Mbit/sec anyway.
I've only had one incident: one day, all of the drives attached to one of the cards failed. I don't know if one drive had a fault, and took the whole card with it, or whether the problem originated in the card itself. But it failed in a way that no data was lost - the kernel detected the problem and immediately halted the array. I was able to reboot, run the command to reassemble all the drives back together (mdadm --assemble --update=resync /dev/sda /dev/sdb ..., I think), and it all came back up fine.
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