Revo 64 RAID card prices slashed

[Lee H]

Hmmm - don't you just hate poxy proxies.

netcell's now showing as unavailable for me as well now.

I'll email our contact at XFX and see if I can get any news.

Best Regards,

[eberian]

Just because a company ceases to exist does not mean their products magically stop working!

Yup - That is why I said "take a chance". You might get years of happy service out of it... but you might not, and then you could end up with data you can't recover, on kit you can't get a replacement for.

BTW, can anyone else see *.netcell.com ?
www.demon.net/external and dnsstuff.com both fail to resolve [www|forums].netcell.com

Scan have just replied to my query - Check Lee @ Scan above - Thanks Lee!

[Steve A]

Your still covered warranty wise, so i really don't see much of a problem whether they have gone tits up or not ... they are a good kit and especially now because of the price drop ..

[Lee H]

Update - Pete rang XFX and according to them it's still all systems go with the Revo cards

[8bit]

: SATA300 would be useless without PCIe, It's already on limited bandwidth.

But if a SATA 300, PCIe version appeared, i would buy it it on lauch day. as wouild many others I suspect.

Sure, but there's no current hard disk that can even saturate the SATA/150 interface and they still make them in SATA/300...

And the XFX Revo cards not being available in PCIe from the outset....

Not to mention the Gigabyte RAM hard disk thing having only SATA/150...

The theme here being that common sense is an ironic concept, since it's apparently not that common in IT product companies

This is a pity - I also liked the look of this card, and would have bought a number if decent linux support had appeared, but it looks like the end of the line for this product

If the cards don't require a driver then how can they *not* be supported by linux? IIRC all the array config/management was done by the card's own BIOS so surely once that's got it's sh*t together at POST/boot time then once it hands over to the bootloader on the drive/array it's entirely transparent?

I'm not trying to pick holes in your post, just I'm now thinking about nabbing one of these quick and will want it to work on Linux. If someone knows my assumption to be incorrect please let me know before I part with any cash!

[ExceededGoku]

I've decided that I will be getting the 5 port version, does anyone recommend me waiting for a PCI-E version? or is the PCI version considerably better than onboard anyway?

[directhex]

If the cards don't require a driver then how can they *not* be supported by linux? IIRC all the array config/management was done by the card's own BIOS so surely once that's got it's sh*t together at POST/boot time then once it hands over to the bootloader on the drive/array it's entirely transparent?

I'm not trying to pick holes in your post, just I'm now thinking about nabbing one of these quick and will want it to work on Linux. If someone knows my assumption to be incorrect please let me know before I part with any cash!

part of the "driverless" fallacy. they *are* driverless, as long as you patch the ide-generic.c driver to support them properly. that's the same thing, right?

and, as you suggest, part of the problem with "driverless" is lack of management - you need a proper interface to the card to manage it, and under linux that's usually a fully presented area in /sys or /proc

[Funkstar]

EDIT: should have realised there was a second page to this thread now. someone can delete this if they want.

[eberian]

If the cards don't require a driver then how can they *not* be supported by linux? IIRC all the array config/management was done by the card's own BIOS so surely once that's got it's sh*t together at POST/boot time then once it hands over to the bootloader on the drive/array it's entirely transparent?

I'm not trying to pick holes in your post, just I'm now thinking about nabbing one of these quick and will want it to work on Linux. If someone knows my assumption to be incorrect please let me know before I part with any cash!

Hi 8Bit,
Fair question - The card is driverless under linux, but (AFAIK) does not support SMART, and there were no raid management tools. To my understanding, that means you can't tell when drives are overheating or degrading, and you cannot rebuild the array online.

For me, that is a showstopper. You might be happy to reboot and rebuild through the BIOS, but how would you know that the array needed rebuilding until it was too late?

It is nice to hear from XFX (via Scan) that it is still "all systems go" with the Revo - so please can you tell us where the support is? (given that no-one can find netcell)

http://www.xfxforce.com/web/support/drivers.jspa
...does not seem to have any information about the Revo

Hmmm.

[8bit]

part of the "driverless" fallacy. they *are* driverless, as long as you patch the ide-generic.c driver to support them properly. that's the same thing, right?

OK I hold my hands up here - while on one hand the whole SATA-II/SATA300 thing does my head in (SATA/300 is NOT the same as SATA-II) I am guilty of mis-using the term "driverless" in this case. You are right, rather than being "driverless", the Revo cards are seen as a generic, bootable IDE device.

To that end and given that Windows has a compatible driver built in, I'd have imagined Linux to be able to boot transparently off the device just as well as Windows. What you're saying then, is that one *would* have to do some additional configuration to get a Linux distro to boot from a Revo64-hosted array, have I got that right?

and, as you suggest, part of the problem with "driverless" is lack of management - you need a proper interface to the card to manage it, and under linux that's usually a fully presented area in /sys or /proc

Again without wishing to appear picky, I don't believe I said this was a problem as such. You're right enough though, this isn't the usual way to do things in Linux but then this isn't a "usual" RAID controller. It's not aimed at the server market or it would cost a lot more (5-10x) and would come with a monitoring/config utility to run in the host machine's OS. It's an enthusiast and low-end workstation product so affordable performance and moderate fault-tolerance are the combined focus, not bulletproof redundancy.

Hi 8Bit,
Fair question - The card is driverless under linux, but (AFAIK) does not support SMART, and there were no raid management tools. To my understanding, that means you can't tell when drives are overheating or degrading, and you cannot rebuild the array online.

Maybe I've got something wrong here but neither of my SATA drives seem to present any SMART info back to the host. I'm using the integrated VIA 8297 (IIRC) on my motherboard and speedfan certainly doesn't see any SMART-capable drives. I'm pretty sure I've got that option switched on in my BIOS but I'll double check.

For me, that is a showstopper.

Well you've said it yourself, this doesn't sound like it's the right card for you then

You might be happy to reboot and rebuild through the BIOS, but how would you know that the array needed rebuilding until it was too late?

I'd imagine it would beep annoyingly. At least I'd hope so if it's not going to do anything else...

[eberian]

To that end and given that Windows has a compatible driver built in, I'd have imagined Linux to be able to boot transparently off the device just as well as Windows. What you're saying then, is that one *would* have to do some additional configuration to get a Linux distro to boot from a Revo64-hosted array, have I got that right?

http://techreport.com/reviews/2005q4...4/index.x?pg=2

According to the above link, support was added in kernel 2.6.13. They say there are patches for Fedora 2 and Suse 9.1, but you would have to get them from the netcell site. Doh!

Again without wishing to appear picky, I don't believe I said this was a problem as such. You're right enough though, this isn't the usual way to do things in Linux but then this isn't a "usual" RAID controller. It's not aimed at the server market or it would cost a lot more (5-10x) and would come with a monitoring/config utility to run in the host machine's OS. It's an enthusiast and low-end workstation product so affordable performance and moderate fault-tolerance are the combined focus, not bulletproof redundancy.

Sure, at £100+, you expect serious kit. At £45, you might be more tolerant. There is a windows configuration utility, it is the Linux side of things that I have been focused on, and that is lacking.

Maybe I've got something wrong here but neither of my SATA drives seem to present any SMART info back to the host. I'm using the integrated VIA 8297 (IIRC) on my motherboard and speedfan certainly doesn't see any SMART-capable drives. I'm pretty sure I've got that option switched on in my BIOS but I'll double check.

Ah, my bad - I had inferred from your previous message that you were running linux, in which case I would suggest "hddtemp /dev/sda" or "smartctl -d ata /dev/sda". Don't know anything about speedfan on windows.

I'd imagine it would beep annoyingly. At least I'd hope so if it's not going to do anything else...

Good plan - but it would need a buzzer for that, and I can't see any sign of one in any of the pictures or any mention of one in the manual.

Good Luck,
Ed

[8bit]

http://techreport.com/reviews/2005q4...4/index.x?pg=2

According to the above link, support was added in kernel 2.6.13. They say there are patches for Fedora 2 and Suse 9.1, but you would have to get them from the netcell site. Doh!

Let's hope it's just a temporary site outage then!

Sure, at £100+, you expect serious kit. At £45, you might be more tolerant. There is a windows configuration utility, it is the Linux side of things that I have been focused on, and that is lacking.

Aha, I hadn't realised there was a Windows utility for these cards, thought it was all just done in the card's BIOS. My bad!

Ah, my bad - I had inferred from your previous message that you were running linux, in which case I would suggest "hddtemp /dev/sda" or "smartctl -d ata /dev/sda". Don't know anything about speedfan on windows.

I do sometimes, having gotten bored with Fedora I've been playing with Ubuntu lately (ever find that "Ubuntu" is deceptively hard to type correctly?), I'll fire it up and have a look. Thx for the tip!

Good plan - but it would need a buzzer for that, and I can't see any sign of one in any of the pictures or any mention of one in the manual.

Well my assumption was based on my other incorrect assumption that there was no OS-based utility for any OS. In that case yes, cmon Netcell/XFX, bring on the Linux support pls kthxbye

Oh BTW eberian, just noticed you're new here. Welcome!

[Methanoid]

Since Netcell.com is gone, does anyone have the Firmware update util as XFX dont supply (referring you to Netcell) and I *need* to update the FW ??

[Methanoid]

DOH - manual says go to Netcell forit but its "hidden" on the CD

[jkresh]

After reading the reviews (and recent mention in computer power user) I am really interested in a pcie version of this card, but with netcells webpage down and xfx not responding I am not too hopeful. Though I did see netcell say they have a pcie card ready they just need either xfx or pny to make retail ones, but that was months ago, so who knows.

[jkresh]

xfx just responded to my question. They say they dont know of any pci-e cards that are "in the works"