List of real SATA RAID Cards for Linux

Source: hxc.hu, pawel_231, 372519

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

2 thoughts on “List of real SATA RAID Cards for Linux

  1. Fifo

    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

    Reply
  2. Ted Kevin Feasel

    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

    Reply

Leave a Reply to Fifo Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *