Has anyone used a LSI UATA 133 Mega RAID Controller Card under linux? I'm contemplating mirroring a couple of 200GB ATA drives on my home server(500Mhz celeron HP 6545C). I'm planning on using Fedora Core 1 or Fedora Core 2.

Nate

I recently installed a HP ProLiant ML330 G3, which has a LSI ATA133-2 SATA RAID (aka MegaRAID IDE) onboard. Probably your controller is similar.
There is a binary kernel module (megaide.o) for some distros; if Fedora is not supported, you must compile the source against your distro's (installer) kernel.
As the sources are not available for Download from LSI, I contacted their support and within a few hours I received them. Following the readme file, compiling was no problem.

If you want to boot from the RAID array, you need to pack the module on the initrd. Probably Fedora will do this during install. For this you would need megaide.o on a disk to feed the installer.

What is the harddrive performance, stability, and useability like on the system you installed?

I did not do performance measurement yet.

Since the machine has gone productive last Tuesday, I can't tell much about stability either. At the moment it simply works.

Concerning performance I would not expect too much of it, as firmware is built into the driver, not in hardware, so the main processor has to do all the work.

This server had been given to us by a customer; if I had had the choice, I would have used SCSI instead, or (for a low cost/low performance system) pure software RAID.

Think I'm going to try a MegaRAID SATA 150-2 controller since SATA drives are the next generation drive and should be a standard for some time to come. Thanks for the responses. I will post results in the coming weeks.

Nate

Crap. I'm getting the following message: Expansion Rom not Initialized - PCI Mass Storage Controller in Slot 03, Bus:01, Device: 0A, Function 00. I have a support request into LSI Logic. I successfully flashed the BIOS/Firmware with the latest rev from the LSI web site, but that didn't help. I have an uneasy feeling that this may be an issue with my HP motherboard BIOS.

None of the suggestions offered by LSI tech support worked, except for using the card with a newer motherboard. I wanted to mirror large sata drives in an older box(HP6545C 500MHz celeron) that I use as a webserver and NFS server. The 150-2 card seems to work well in my athlon 1800+ machine. I guess I may resort to software mirroring a couple of 200GB PATA drives in the HP6545C.

Thanks for the help,
Nate