Dell CERC SATA Raid card w/RAID 5

[wallsfd949]

The current Dell promotion with the PowerEdge 1800 comes with a Free CERC 6 channel SATA Raid card. There is one other type they offer on the higher end servers (PERC).

My plan for this box is CentOS (RedHate Enterprise Linux 4) with 2-40GB system disks in RAID 0 and 4-320GB disks in RAID 5.

Is this going to work as a true hardware RAID?

edit
They claim this card is a $350 value so I'm assuming it's hardware

 

[wallsfd949]

bump?

 

[dew042]

I would also be concerned to see if its plain PCI. If it is -- the bandwidth will max out the bus and performance will be hindered.

dew.

 

[wallsfd949]

After some digging, I'm fairly convinced the card is an LSI MegaRAID SATA 150-6
# 64-bit/66 MHz PCI bus
# Integrated I/O processor
# Re-flashable BIOS
# RAID Levels 0, 1, 5, 10, and 50 supported
# Supports all major OSs
# 64 MB of integrated ECC SDRAM memory
# Hot pluggable drive support

And some other features. I think I'm good, but confirmation would be nice.

 

[hbien]

We have this card, I think it's more likely a derivative of the Adaptec 4 channel or 8 channel SATA card. First, if you go to Dell's downloads, it clearly identifies the card as an "Adaptec CERC 1.5s/6ch". Since Adaptec does not offer any 6-channel RAIDs, I can only assume Dell somehow managed to slap two more ports on it. Unfortunately, I think they failed to increase the onboard CPU speed, and therefore performance, as we found, suffered greatly (this is for a PE1800, dual Xeon 3Ghz, 12GB RAM, 5x250GB SATA HDD). In our internal testing, we have found connecting the hard drive directly to the onboard SATA controller yielded much better write performance than even a 5-drive RAID0 through the RAID controller. Draw you own conclusions.

Oh, btw, its a PCI 64/66Mhz (identical to Adaptec's 4/16ch offerings), so bandwidth was not the limiting factor. The HDD were Maxtor 250GB SATA drives, write-cache was enabled (this adapter does not come with battery backup).