[App_rpt-users] Hardware RAID --was: DIAL manual install from Debian

[David McGough]

Since we're on the topic of -hardware- RAID controllers, I thought I'd
point users to a one style of reliable, workhorse RAID board, which is
available for $peanuts$ surplus (ebay). This board is a 3ware 8006-2LP.
They're well supported "out of the box" by all flavors of Linux and
are typically very highly reliable, in my experience. The caveats are that
they are old PCI-bus boards, not too fast by todays standards, and can
only utilize smaller SATA drives....But, they are true hardware RAID 1 and
when installed in older PC's, they work very well for Asterisk/AllStar/PBX
applications. I've still got many of these installed, here and there.

Here is a example board from ebay: http://www.ebay.com/itm/181788655753

These boards have saved me from HD crash frustration more times than I can 
count! ...They also make it really easy to perform a HD image backup by 
pulling (they support hot-swap) a running RAID 1 drive and swapping in a 
spare. The removed drive then becomes a backup.

73, David KB4FXC