Advice about motherboard selection for RAID server

[dataspy]

I'm interested in building a RAID fileserver and was hoping I could get some suggestions for a motherboard? I'll be using [url=http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816115024&Tpk=HighPoint%20RocketRAID%202240%20PCI-X%20SATA%20II%20%283.0Gb%2fs%29]HighPoint RocketRAID 2240[/url] as my RAID controller.

Is there a list of support motherboards for centos anywhere?

Any help greatly appreciated,
thanks in advance.

[TrevorH]

You might be artificially limiting yourself by choosing that controller. It's a PCI-X controller which was superceded by PCI-E. PCI-X is getting pretty long in the tooth. In addition, I'm not sure that I've ever seen a successful report of anyone using a Highpoint RAID controller with Linux as the vast majority of their cards seem to be FakeRAID cards (though I've never used one and have no direct experience with them so I may be maligning them unnecessarily).

[dataspy]

Thanks, I'm still looking into more RAID cards, that one seemed appealing at first but I still have a lot more googling to do! Do you have any suggestions as to a good RAID card?

[TrevorH]

The only ones I have personal experience with are Dell and HP SAS controllers and I suspect that they really only like to work in their respective manufacturer's servers. A few years ago the de facto standard for add-in RAID cards for use with Linux was 3Ware but these days that seems to have changed and the reports I've seen of them on several IRC chats recently has been most disparaging. I've also seen good and bad reports of Areca controllers but I don't have experience with any of them.

[dataspy]

Thanks for your help, I will continue with my googling!!! :-D

[foxb]

What about not using HW RAID?!

You can use Linux SW RAID and get similar performance.

Any recent CPU will handle easily the load...

[Kyle]

I am setting up a new server using this Mobo:

SUPERMICRO MBD-H8SGL-F-O ATX Server Motherboard Socket G34 AMD SR5650 DDR3 1333

I picked it because you can get an 8-core amd processor for $250 to go with it. Plus, you can use DDR3 Unbuffered non-ECC memory - so you can get 32 GB of ram in it at a low cost.

For raid card I picked the Adaptec RAID 5805 2244100-R SATA/SAS 8 internal ports w/ 512MB cache memory Controller Card, Kit. Its kinda pricey but highpoint support is bad and I have had good support from adaptec in the past. Maybe its phone support that's bad at highpoint but all I know is I called to ask some basic tech questions and the tech who answered the call had no clue about anything. . .

The 5805 supports 8 drives, lots of support for linux as far as raid drivers and management interface. I also paid for the battery kit to go with the raid card. Supports RAID 0, 1, 1E, 5, 5EE, 6, 10, 50 and 60.

One thing I did to decide what raid controller to buy was install the driver and management interface for the ones I was looking at. You don't need to have the raid card to do this. I had problems installing the highpoint drivers but no problems at all with the adaptec drivers. Installing the highpoint drivers required more linux knowledge that I currently have. Adaptec had drivers that were ready to install for centos6.

My 2 cents worth. . .



:-D

[megatux]

For a RAID server you would really want ECC memory, unless data integrity isn't worth much to you...

You can get AMD based mobos that support unbuffered ECC memory. Unbuffered ECC memory only costs little more than non-ECC memory so it's well worth it to preserve data integrity (unlike buffered ECC memory that's much more expensive).

Also as foxb says, with Linux software raid (dm-raid) is actually preferable to hardware raid. It's a lot more flexible and your data isn't dependent on some proprietary controller.

[Kyle]

Hi - the SUPERMICRO MBD-H8SGL supports both.

up to 128GB of DDR3 Reg. ECC 1333/1066/800 or 32GB of DDR3 Unb. ECC/non-ECC memory