Which disk controllers work best with Linux?

[Kris Kirby]

On Tue, 14 Sep 2010, Robin Bowes wrote:
> > The only time we use hardware RAID is if the workload really needs 
> > the low-latency writes offered by battery-backed write caching.
> 
> If you don't want to use HW raid, but want battery-backed write 
> caching, you can use a HW controller with a battery-backed cache (PERC 
> 6/i, H700, etc) and configure each drive as a separate RAID0 volume.

DBAN positively does not like logical drives configured for Caching IO 
and WriteBack on SCSI PERC 4s. Attempting to wipe multiple drives on a 
single controller (or dual-port controller) will result in SCSI errors 
which are fatal to the program. They do not appear to wedge the Linux 
kernel; it merely bides it's time until the controller / IO has 
completed and returned. DBAN falls apart because of device and 
unhandled errors, as DBAN is working directly with the device nodes in 
/dev and not using the drives under any form of filesystem.  

--
Kris Kirby, KE4AHR
Disinformation Analyst