I am looking for a real RAID card for my Linux server, which will act as a RAID 1 for two SATA drives. It turns out that many of the cheap RAID cards are “fake raid”, and their manufacturers are trying to hide this fact.
So I decided to do a quick research on the internet about available RAID cards for Linux 🙂
What is a “fakeraid” card?
A fakeraid card means that it is essentially a 2 or 4 port SATA card with additional hardware and BIOS code. In order for the operating system to use the RAID feature of the card, a driver has to be installed, which will do all or part of the RAID logic on the mainboard’s CPU. This means that what you get is actually a software RAID, and not a true hardware solution.
So if you have a fakeraid card on your Linux box, you better off using Linux’s built in software based RAID feature.
Since there is not once place on the net that has a list of true RAID cards, I decided to put my own list here. Please feel free to send information about additional cards.
List of true RAID cards for Linux
Following is a list of 100% hardware based RAID cards, that are supported under Linux.
| Manufacturer | Model | PCI | SATA | SAS | Internal ports | External ports | drives | RAID levels | Cache | Hotplug | NCQ | Battery backup |
| Adaptec | 2045 | PCIe 8 | 3 GB/s | Yes | 0 | 1 | 4 | 0, 1, 1E, 10, JBOD | 128MB | Y | Y | N |
| 2405 | PCIe 8 | 3 GB/s | Yes | 1 | 0 | 4 | 0, 1, 1E, 10, JBOD | 128MB | Y | Y | N | |
| 2805 | PCIe 8 | 3 GB/s | Yes | 2 | 0 | 8 | 0, 1, 1E, 10, JBOD | 128MB | Y | Y | N | |
| 3405 | PCIe 4 | 3 GB/s | Yes | 1 | 0 | 4 | 0, 1, 1E, 5, 5EE, 6, 10, 50, 60, JBOD | 128MB | Y | Y | Y | |
| 3805 | PCIe 4 | 3 GB/s | Yes | 2 | 0 | 8 | 0, 1, 1E, 5, 5EE, 6, 10, 50, 60, JBOD | 128MB | Y | Y | Y | |
| 5405 | PCIe 8 | 3 GB/s | Yes | 1 | 0 | 4 | 0, 1, 1E, 5, 5EE, 6, 10, 50, 60, JBOD | 256MB | Y | Y | Y | |
| 5445 | PCIe 8 | 3 GB/s | Yes | 1 | 1 | 8 | 0, 1, 1E, 5, 5EE, 6, 10, 50 and 60 | 512MB | Y | Y | Y | |
| 5085 | PCIe 8 | 3 GB/s | Yes | 0 | 2 | 8 | 0, 1, 1E, 5, 5EE, 6, 10, 50 and 60 | 512MB | Y | Y | N | |
| 5805 | PCIe 8 | 3 GB/s | Yes | 2 | 0 | 8 | 0, 1, 1E, 5, 5EE, 6, 10, 50 and 60 | 512MB | Y | Y | Y | |
| 51245 | PCIe 8 | 3 GB/s | Yes | 3 | 1 | 16 | 0, 1, 1E, 5, 5EE, 6, 10, 50 and 60 | 512MB | Y | Y | Y | |
| 51645 | PCIe 8 | 3 GB/s | Yes | 4 | 1 | 20 | 0, 1, 1E, 5, 5EE, 6, 10, 50 and 60 | 512MB | Y | Y | Y | |
| 52445 | PCIe 8 | 3 GB/s | Yes | 6 | 1 | 28 | 0, 1, 1E, 5, 5EE, 6, 10, 50 and 60 | 512MB | Y | Y | Y | |
| 5405Z | PCIe 8 | 3 GB/s | Yes | 1 | 0 | 4 | 0, 1, 1E, 5, 5EE, 6, 10, 50 and 60 | 512MB | Y | Y | Flash based | |
| 5445Z | PCIe 8 | 3 GB/s | Yes | 1 | 1 | 8 | 0, 1, 1E, 5, 5EE, 6, 10, 50 and 60 | 512MB | Y | Y | Flash based | |
| 5805Z | PCIe 8 | 3 GB/s | Yes | 2 | 0 | 8 | 0, 1, 1E, 5, 5EE, 6, 10, 50 and 60 | 512MB | Y | Y | Flash based | |
| 6405E | PCIe 8 | 6 GB/s | Yes | 1 | 0 | 4 | 0, 1, 10, 1E and JBOD | 128MB | Y | Y | N | |
| 6405T | PCIe 8 | 6 GB/s | Yes | 1 | 0 | ? | 0, 1, 1E, 5, 5EE, 6, 10, 50 and 60 | 512MB | Y | Y | N | |
| 6405 | PCIe 8 | 6 GB/s | Yes | 1 | 0 | ? | 0, 1, 1E, 5, 5EE, 6, 10, 50 and 60 | 512MB | Y | Y | Flash based | |
| 6805E | PCIe 4 | 6 GB/s | Yes | 2 | 0 | 8 | 0, 1, 10, 1E and JBOD | 128MB | Y | Y | N | |
| 6805T | PCIe 8 | 6 GB/s | Yes | 2 | 0 | 8 | 0, 1, 1E, 5, 5EE, 6, 10, 50 and 60 | 512MB | Y | Y | Flash based | |
| 6805 | PCIe 8 | 6 GB/s | Yes | 2 | 0 | 8 | 0, 1, 1E, 5, 5EE, 6, 10, 50 and 60 | 512MB | Y | Y | Flash based | |
| LSI | MegaRAID 8888ELP | PCIe 8 | 3 GB/s | 2 | 2 | 8 | 0, 1, 5, 6, 10, 50 and 60 | 256MB/512MB | ? | ? | Y | |
| MegaRAID8880EM2 | PCIe 8 | 3 GB/s | 0 | 2 | 8 | 0, 1, 5, 6, 10, 50 and 60 | 512MB | ? | ? | Y | ||
| MegaRAID 8708EM2 | PCIe 8 | 3 GB/s | 0 | 2 | 8 | 0, 1, 5, 6, 10, 50 and 60 | 256MB | ? | ? | |||
| MegaRaid 8704EM2 | PCIe 8 | 3 GB/s | 0 | 1 | 4 | 0, 1, 5, 6, 10 | 128MB | ? | ? | |||
| 3ware (LSI) | 9650SE-2LP | PCIe | 3 GB/s | N | 2 | 0 | 2 | 0, 1, JBOD | 128MB | ? | ? | Y |
| 9650SE-4LPML | PCIe 4 | 3 GB/s | 1 | 0 | 4 | 0, 1, 5, 10, JBOD | 256MB | ? | ? | |||
| 9650SE-8LPML | PCIe 4 | 3 GB/s | 2 | 0 | 8 | 0, 1, 5, 10, JBOD | 256MB | ? | ? | |||
| 9650SE-12LPML | PCIe 8 | 3 GB/s | 3 | 0 | 12 | 0, 1, 5, 6, 10, 50, JBOD | 256MB | ? | ? | |||
| 9650SE-16LPML | PCIe 8 | 3 GB/s | 4 | 0 | 16 | 0, 1, 5, 6, 10, 50, JBOD | 256MB | ? | ? | |||
| 9650SE-24M8 | PCIe 8 | 3 GB/s | multi lane | 0 | 24 | 0, 1, 5, 6, 10, 50, JBOD | 512MB | ? | ? |
List of real RAID chipsets
- Adaptec AAR 2400, 2410, 2410SA, 2120S, 2200S, 2810SA (8-port), 21610SA (16-port)
- Adaptec Adaptec AAR 2420SA (4-port) and AAR 2820SA (8-port) PCI-X cards
- 3Ware Escalade 8xxx, 9xxx and 95xx families.
- LSI Logic MegaRAID SATA 150-4 (four ports) and 150-6
- LSI Logic MegaRAID SATA 300-4X 4-port and 300-8X 8-port SATA-II PCI-X cards
References:
- Adaptect’s web site.
- LSI (and 3ware) web site.
- http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Hardware/sata.html
- http://web.archive.org/web/20080305164412/http://linux-ata.org/faq-sata-raid.html
I have 2 HP AMD Opteron DL servers with this RAID Cards: HP SmartRaid P400 and HP Smartraid P410.
This cards are real RAID and I can install a Debian/Ubuntu distributions without problems.
In others aspects, I just have problems of lower performance in IO. But it’s work and actualy are in production systems.
Thanks for this list of raid cards. I want replace this cards for newer version for SSD Disks and it’s dificult found information of this type.
Pablo Iglesias
It should be noted all of these ive looked at (found out the hard way are eSATA connectors and cannot be used with normal internal SATA drives