-- Matt Garman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> spake thusly: > On Fri, Mar 28, 2003 at 02:19:01PM +1100, Mark Saunders wrote: >> Which is the best supported IDE RAID chipset? >> >> I'm after a motherboard with onboard IDE RAID support. >> >> I gave up on an ASUS A7V8X with a Promise Fasttrack onboard IDE RAID >> controller. > > I'm certainly no expert here, but I have been snooping around a bit > for Linux and IDE RAID information. > > If I understand the situation correctly, there are very few "true" > hardware IDE RAID controllers supported by Linux. (I believe that one > company offering these is 3ware). But these are REALLY expensive. > From what I gather, most of the "commodity" IDE RAID boards (Promise, > HighPoint) are not hardware RAID; they rely on drivers (read: > software) to do much of the RAID work. With this in mind, it appears > your time would be better spent simply using the Linux md (multi-disk) > functionality for software-level RAID (without needing any special > hardware). Unless you have lots of money and can't afford to give up > a tiny percetage of your CPU power, Linux md is the way to go.
I used md on top of an onboard RAID MB (Iwill, as I recall, and I don't remember what the chipset was). I'd bought the system expecting to get RAID, and found out what I essentially ended up with was a couple extra IDE busses. My experience was that md was far too much of a CPU hog when doing excessive disk accesses (ripping and encoding ogg's, for instance), and I ended up going with a hardware solution. I've been much happier with it. If you've got the money (and particularly if you want to do RAID-5), I highly recommend the 3ware cards. They've got a 4-channel card (so you can put each drive on a separate channel, with none of this master/slave stuff) which supports RAID-5 (as well as 0, 1, etc. of course), has open-sourced drivers (included in the kernel) and acts as a single scsi interface (per array). They're a bit pricy, but well worth it in my opinion. > Someone please correct me if any of this info is inaccurate! > > With this in mind, however, what ARE the good "RAID" motherboards (for > the extra IDE channels) or good add-on IDE PCI controllers? By "good" > I mean having mature, stable Linux drivers? -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
