Fwd: RAID

[lordSauron <lordsauronthegreat@gmail.com>]

I'm about as absent minded as you can get.  I really wish that they'd
add a reply-to part to this list, b/c I almost never remember to send
to the list, and not to the sender...  I know it's supposed to cause
major lag on the mail servers, but in my little case it'll probably
far outweigh the lag created by my lack of presence of mind...

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: lordSauron <lordsauronthegreat@gmail.com>
Date: Nov 8, 2005 8:58 PM
Subject: Re: RAID
To: Lennart Sorensen <lsorense@csclub.uwaterloo.ca>


On 11/8/05, Lennart Sorensen <lsorense@csclub.uwaterloo.ca> wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 08, 2005 at 12:14:52PM -0800, lordSauron wrote:
> > Hi, I was just doing some information gathering for a potential
> > upgrade I want to perform.
> >
> > I have a ECS Elitegroup nForce 3-A motherboard, which has built-in
> > RAID 0/1/0+1 support.  I want to get a 80 Gb SATA150 drive, but if I
> > can get RAID to work with linux, I'd love to pay more but get two 40
> > Gb SATA150 drives, and RAID 0 them together.  *However,* when I tried
> > this with a ATA 27 Gb drive and a IDE 14.7 Gb drive (a IBM Deskstar
> > and a Segate brand drive respectively) and then tried it with the
> > amd64 installer (which supported kernel ver. 2.6.x-11, the x being
> > holes in my memory) it didn't work (or at least I couldn't make it
> > work, but I'm still not that great at installing so it's totally
> > possible I just majorly screwed up and did something stupid along the
> > line...).  I think it'd work with the newer kernels (>= -12) b/c with
> > the -11 my m-board integrated audio and LAN didn't work, but now they
> > do... so I think that it's just that the -11 kernel didn't yet have
> > the device drivers for these components, and now that these things
> > work, the RAID should work too, right?  I just wanted to see if anyone
> > knew the status of this...
> >
> > Thanks for any info you can give me!
>
> Use software raid in linux.  The installer can allow yo to set it up.

I don't know... I think that the nVidia nForce 3's RAID is on the
contoller level, so I think it should work, but I'm not sure.

> No desktop motherboard has hardware raid onboard.  Many have fake raid
> however which is simply the bios pretending to be raid until the driver
> (usually proprietary) takes over doing raid.  It is all software, and
> usually not as fast or efficient as what linux can do in software.

> Now why would you buy 40G drives when they cost (at least around here)
> the same as 80G drives.  2 x 40G would cost twice the price of a single
> 80G.  Buying a pair of 160 or 200G drives would make much more sense.
> Also larger drives are denser and hence faster than smaller drives, so
> you may actually get less performance striping two smaller drives, and
> the reliability goes way down since you have two points of failure
> instead of one.  Insane setup really.

Yeah, that hit me rather suddenly in the car on the way home...
However, I don't have the raw cash to buy anything over about 120Gb.

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--
=== GCB v3.1 ===
GCS d-(+) s+:- a? C+(++++) UL+++(++++) P L++(+++)
E- W+(+++) N++ w--- M>++ PS-- PE Y+ PGP- t++(+++) 5?
X? R !tv>-- b++>++++ DI+++>++++ D-- G !e h(*) !r x---
=== EGCB v3.1 ===