Has anyone EVER gotten a highpoint RAID card working?

[mak90]

I have been busting my butt trying to get my HIGHPOINT rocketraid card (2220) working with ubuntu.
-compiled highpoint's driver for my system
-upgraded kernel to 2.6.16.18 AND enabled highly experimental support for the Marvell MV88SX6081 chipset which apparently is what is on this raid card.
-loaded the highpoint compiled drivers and when I do so some devices do show up in /dev, but when i fdisk /dev/sdb (them) I get 'unable to read /dev/sdb'.
After editing my fstab file, and performing a #sudo mount /dev/sdb, i get the following:
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdb,
missing codepage or other error
In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
dmesg | tail or so


I GIVE UP!

IF ANYONE HAS GOTTEN A HIGHPOINT RAID CARD TO WORK, PLEASE HELP ME!

[antidrugue]

Did you try the "dmraid" package?

[mak90]

I'd love to do that eventually - thats the plan in fact. But I first need to have these drives working properly in linux. If I don't configure them into an array (using the highpoint bios) they don't even show up in /dev. Therefore dmraid says No RAID DRIVES or something.

I expected to be able to load the .ko driver module for the card, and then all the drives attached to this card would magically show up.

I must be missing something.

thx

[karlheg]

I've recently puchased a RocketRAID 2300, and in seeking information about it, I wrote an email to Gary Sandine of Los Alamos Computers (www.laclinux.com). Here's what he told me; hope this helps.

On Sat, 2006-06-10 at 11:02 -0700, Karl Hegbloom wrote:
> Do you have any experience with the Highpoint RocketRAID:
>
> http://www.highpoint-tech.com/USA/rr2300.htm
>
> I've bought one; it's en-route. There is a driver for it's hardware
> RAID features. Do you think it will work better as a hardware RAID or
> with Linux md RAID?

I haven't used rr2300 but I have used rr2220. The "hardware" RAID
driver seems to work OK (there's a free sata_mv driver that doesn't work
at all, but the hptmv6 driver from Highpoint works fine). I'd probably
use the Highpoint RAID instead of md raid if I was going to use one.
The only potential problem I can think of is, one time a kernel Promise
RAID driver changed the location of the device from /dev/sd? to
something weird (I'm sure you can imagine what kinds of problems that
can cause . I don't know if Highpoint's driver will ever do that.

One thing if you go the md route, the rr2220 does not export drives that
are not assigned to arrays. So, one must make single disk jbod arrays
in order for them to show up as /dev/sda, /dev/sdb, etc. to use them for
md RAID.
-----

Also see: http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Hardware/sata.html#fakeraid

So, it looks to me like configuring the drives as JBOD volumes and using them with Linux software RAID is going to make a faster array that will be easier to support.

[brandonbates]

I am currently testing the HighPoint RocketRAID 2320 on an Fedora Core 5 (FC5) system. Updated to 2.6.16-1, compiled raid kernel module driver with make install, installed raid GUI, created 3TB RAID5 volume with 7 500GB 7200.9's (+1 spare), initialized - waited 3.5 hours, initialized volume in LVM (but didn't make an LVM volume for this test), did mkfs -t xfs /dev/sdc, then mount /dev/sdc /mnt/test and no big deal, it's up. Ran 1st test with write-through cache and got 20.4 MB/s (yuck), then turned write-back on and got 236 MB/s write. Read performance still seems a little weird 40-60 MB/s, but then again I'm using dd if=testfile of=/dev/null to test so I don't know what implications that has, though dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/null give me 87 GB/s (I wish disk were that fast !!!) Still messing with it, it's going to be one of many online archive servers and perhaps also iSCSI. (Cheaper than a commercial disk shelf by far, into it about $4k and will be another $3k to top off the box at 6TB)

[karlheg]

It has been functioning flawlessly for several months now. It is a little bit inconvenient to have to build a custom kernel from patched source to get it working. I use 'make-kpkg' from the "kernel-package" .deb to do that.

I had trouble with the drives overheating, so I installed another 120mm silent fan just behind the drives in my Antec Sonata II case. No troubles since then.