Re: Using RAID chipsets in the motherboard.
hi ya ramesh
On Tue, 30 Dec 2003, Ramasubramanian Ramesh wrote:
> 1) All most all of the newer motherboards come with SATA RAID. Is this usable
> as is without any additional kernel drivers. I ask this because I read in
> many knowledge base resources that a HW controller looks just like an IDE
> controller.
dont bother ...
sata by itself is a good brain twister to some ...
onboard raid has never worked .. imho
- never worked ----> allows for hands off booting of any disks
in the array w/o any data loss or "fiddling time" loss
> 2) What about additional on board RAID controllers? Like the VIA/PROMISE
> Chipsets built into some of the ASUS mother boards?
list of hardware raid controllers
http://www.1U-Raid5.net/HW/hw.txt
> Do they require
> additional drivers or can I use them just like any other IDE controller?
yes.. you need a driver for that hardware ...
3ware (raid cards) has readily available and easily understandable raid
drivers for their cards
hw raid -- you're stuck with what they give you for driver support
and monitoring
sw raid .. do what you like to your hearts content ..
> 3) My need for using these controllers is to have the ability to add extra disk
> and I do not need their RAID features.
neither hardware/software raid does not lend itslef too easily to "expand
your raid" to larger capacity
- you cannot merely add a disk
- you have to have a resizable partition and resizable fs to "add
a new disk" to add mroe capacity to your 100% full raid subsystem
> But if RAID can be had without much
> trouble I definitely would like to give it a try. The bottom line is I like to get beyond the
raid is too much trouble for the benefits one gets
- you want raid iff ..
- you cannot afford for that data to go offline
- you have the $$$ to have a 2nd raid backup system
- you can sync data correctly from raid1 to raid2
- you lose more $$$ in being offline than you would be manually
rebuilding a new disk and restore from backups
- you want to protect your system against one disk failure
and you know what the mtbf is for your cpu, memory, fans, disks,
and general user admin boo-boos and go offline anyway
> 4 drive limit with the standard primary and secondary
> controller on the Mobo with the use of these additional builtin controllers.
you can have up to 12 (ide)disks in a raid subsystem
and even mroe in scsi based raids
- i dont know of anybody with more than 12 ide disks in their raid
or willing to play with that much data in an untested manner
- you'd be on the bleeding edge at more than 12 ide disks
c ya
alvin
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