[ILUG] Query regarding LSI Sata Raid and Debian

[John Coleman]

Hi,

I've been mulling over which raid card to buy for the last few months
and I've pretty much decided on the LSI Megaraid Sata 150-6
It's a 6-port SATA controller with an onboard Intel XOR engine and
supports online array migration and enlargement.
As far as I know, using the AMI Megaraid SCSI driver in the kernel,
the card presents itself as a standard SCSI drive. The card firmware
takes care of container creation etc.
One thing I'm curious about is monitoring SMART data on the sata drives.
As it presents as a SCSI device, does anyone know if the card
represents each physical sata disk as a LUN?
As far as I know, smartctrl can (or should?:) read the smart data from
LUN drives.

I'll be mating the card with 3x Hitachi Deskstar 250Gig sata drives at
first, and buying more as funds allow. It will be a straight RAID5
array, perhaps with one hot-spare. XFS fileformat, bsd-ftpd.
I'm also purchasing the Battery back-up module.

Aside from questions as to why I need this much storage, does anyone
have any comments or caveats I should be aware of?

I've looked at 3Ware kit, the 9xxx cards sound nice, but from what
I've heard the raid5 write performance hasn't been improved much and
they cost a hell of alot more than I can afford.
If anyone has any benchmarks to the contrary, I'd like to hear them :)

I'll be ordering the card on Monday.

-- 
John Coleman
Technical Officer
NUIG, Computer Society