Danilo Godec wrote: > > Since CD-ROM will be rarely used (only for instalation and potential > upgrades), is it OK to put it as a slave together with one of the disks? The info I've read says this will impact performance, but it's simple enough to test it, isn't it? The other option is to replace the add-on IDE card with something like a 3Ware IDE RAID card. In addition to letting you use the mobo's IDE channels for things like CD-ROMs, it will reduce your IRQ requirements (you need 4 with the system you propose, 2 with the one I propose) and will handle the RAID in hardware. It's a bit more expensive: probably by about $400 or so, but the benefits may be worth it to you. > Will the disk performace suffer if CD-ROM is just connected but not used? This is the part I am unsure about. What I _am_ sure about is that the master hard disk on the channel _will_ slow down when you're using the slaved CD-ROM. If you're doing something like RAID 0, this will mean your entire system will slow down when you access the CD-ROM because with a properly tuned RAID 0 system, all disks should be accessed for all but the most trivial I/O. With IDE, only one device on a channel can be working at once, so until your CD-ROM can pause what it's doing to let the IDE disk on that channel do something, the entire RAID array will be effectively locked up. Once again a good reason to use a RAID add-on card. -- = Warren -- ICBM Address: 36.8274040 N, 108.0204086 W, alt. 1714m - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
