[ILUG] HighPoint SATA RAID

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Paul Jakma (paul at clubi.ie):

> Most definitely. Check out 'dmraid' too, which can setup devmapper to 
> map disks to various $ODDBALL "proprietary" soft-raid disk formats, 
> no idea whether highpoint is supported though.

Yes, Highpoint 37X is.  See below.

> Also, Jeff Garzik's libata has a WIP driver for some of the Marvell 
> host controllers, which might be what the Highpoint uses.

_Not_ the 154x/1640, which is what John said this is.

> IME with sata_sil, even a beta driver from Jeff Garzik will be better
> quality than a vendor IDE/SCSI host driver (and improve far more
> rapidly).

Garzik has no driver for non-Marvell-based Highpoint cards -- so one
ends up either using the proprietary vendor driver (I wouldn't) or the
standard drivers/ide set.

> See http://linux.yyz.us/sata/, particularly the HPT entry on the SATA
> status page:
> 
> 	http://linux.yyz.us/sata/sata-status.html#hpt
> 
> and obviously the marvell entry just above it. If your HPT doesnt use
> a Marvell, you're out of luck.

Well, not "out of luck":  You use the drivers/ide set for generic block
device support, and then do RAID using the standard Linux "md" driver.
Or, if on 2.6 kernels, and _if_ the Highpoint chipset is of the 37X
series, you can use the dmraid successor to 2.4's ataraid architecture,
and be able to support Highpoint fakeraid directly.

More at:  "Serial ATA" on http://linuxmafia.com/kb/Hardware/