[ILUG] IDE-RAID 133Mhz & distros that support it?

[Niall O Broin]

On Wed, Mar 27, 2002 at 05:56:38PM +0000, Stephen Shirley wrote:

> On Wed, Mar 27, 2002 at 05:35:25PM +0000, Niall O Broin wrote:
> > Vorsicht ! A lot of these so-called IDE-RAID chipsets are not doing hardware
> > RAID (*) but are actually providing their own software RAID via a special
> > 'doze driver. 
> 
> This is not quite true. There are 2 "cheap" raid chipsets out there

Which part is "not quite true" ? It seems from what you say that since I've
looked (easily more than a year, and now that you mention it it was a
Highpoint card I got, I think :-) ) they've added their own software raid
(in the sense that we both mean) drivers for OS other than 'doze.

> (3ware doesn't count - it's a proper raid system) - the promise

I have a 3ware - it's not bad,  but not as fast as a very fast thing. Mine
is a 32 bit PCI version - I gather the new 64 bit PIC models are somewhat
faster.

> is that the distro's installation programs don't understand the
> resulting partitions. Redhat actually have support for those raid
> chipsets in the the 7.2 installation kernel, but the patch to the
> installation program itself was botched or never applied (can't remember
> which). Anyway, the short of it is that unless something has changed in
> the very latest releases, you'll have to install onto a spare hd, and
> copy across the installation when it's finished. That works fine - i did
> it, more out of curiousity than anything else.

So if I do this, that, and the other, and hold my mouth just so, I might get
RAID on one of these chipsets to work. No thanks. Look at how long Linux's
own kernel software RAID took to be stable, and ask yourself to which you'd
rather trust your data. Yeah, not that open source stuff - I'll use good
commercial software because I'll have someone to sue if my data gets lost :-)




Niall