Given all these options, if you're looking for a RAID solution,
you need to think carefully about what you want. Depending on what
you want to do, and which RAID level you wish to use, some cards may
be better than others. SCSI-to-SCSI adapters may not be as good as
host-based adapters, for example (see the
DPT comparison between host-based and SCSI-to-SCSI adapters for why this is the case).
Michael Neuffer (
neuffer@kralle.zdv.uni-mainz.de), the author of the EATA-DMA
driver, has a nice discussion about this on his
Linux High Performance SCSI and RAID page.
The enclosure type affects the hot swapability of the drive, the
warning systems (i.e., whether there will be indication of failure,
and whether you will know which drive has failed), and what kind of
treatment your drive receives (for example, redundant cooling and
power supplies). We used the DPT supplied enclosures for an initial
RAID-5 system of 18 GB, but they are expensive. We are now using a
Wetex enclosure (
http://www.wetex.com/),
which have the same features as the
DPT ones, but are about 1/4 of the cost. The Wetex enclosure system
(14 bays) we use is composed of two RAID-5 arrays, with sizes of 45 GB
and 63 GB.
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