List of companies manufacturing or selling RAID Controller cards:
StorageSearch
Infortrend Corporation
HighPoint Technologies
ICP Vortex
Silicon Image
DMOZ
category
Promise Technology, Inc. is... the creator of ATA RAID. From the newest Serial ATA to legacy Parallel ATA solutions,
Promise maintains strong market leadership with wide range of value-driven
storage product
offerings for Entry-level to Mid-range Enterprise, PC Workstations and desktop PCs.
Promise designs, develops, manufactures and markets a comprehensive line of Serial ATA /
Parallel ATA solutions including
SAN (Storage Area Networks) and
DAS (Direct Attach Storage)
storage enclosure systems that hold terabytes of data with multiple hard disk drives with
advanced data protection and management functionalities ...
more
RAID Controllers and RAID Controller cards
Definition: A RAID controller is a hardware device responsible for
managing physical drives in a system and presenting them to the computer as
logical units.
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The setting up of
RAID 0 and
RAID 1 can be done either via software or hardware.
Some operating systems allow you to setup RAID in the software itself. A better option
is to have a dedicated piece of hardware controlling the RAID functions. A guide to
software RAID in Linux.
RAID controller chips are often imbedded in the motherboard. They also come in the
form of a PCI expansion cards.
Hardware RAID
You need to ensure that the RAID controller card is designed for the type of hard
disks you are using. A RAID controller card designed for use with IDE hard disks will
not take SCSI hard disks. A controller designed to provide just RAID 0 functions will
not allow you to set up a
fault tolerant array.
 The big names in the RAID controller business are
Adaptec, Highpoint, Intel and
Promise.
Highpoint and Promise supply most of the RAID chips that are imbedded in both single CPU
and dual processor motherboards. They also make the RAID controller cards which are sold
on their own. Intel uses it's RAID controller chips in motherboards they produce, Adaptec
is mainly known for it's SCSI based products including SCSI cards and SCSI RAID controller
cards. Many of the manufacturers also build specialist RAID controller cards for use in
"non-standard" situations, eg low profile RAID controller cards for use in restricted spaces
like 2 U server cases etc. You can even get RAID for use with newer technologies like SATA.
Companies like 3Ware manufacture SATA RAID controller cards.
More information on RAID
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