[KLUG Members] Re: RAID

[Peter Buxton]

On Sun, Dec 15, 2002 at 01:53:34AM -0500, Bryan J. Smith wrote:

> On Sun, 2002-12-15 at 00:27, Adam Williams wrote:
> > If your going to use hardware RAID use a card ***NOT*** integrated
> > on the mobo, and have another one around.
> 
> I think what Adam meant by "use a card" he meant "use a _real_
> hardware card" and not just a card with an ATA controller, a BIOS and
> nothing else.

No, I think he meant "no matter what you use, make sure you have a
couple spares handy," which is obviously more important (safety) than
performance.

Frankly, I didn't buy this board for the RAID chip. I wasn't at all
interested in RAID, and I had only two partitions on one drive anyway:
swap and /, until I recently became interested in multidisks. I'm also
perfectly happy using ATA and not SCSI (I'm such a Philistine :).

In any case, I'll take the advice of the kernel hackers, which I had not
read carefully enough the first time:

CONFIG_BLK_DEV_ATARAID
  Say Y or M if you have an IDE Raid controller and want linux
  to use its softwareraid feature.  You must also select an
  appropriate for your board low-level driver below.

  Note, that Linux does not use the Raid implementation in BIOS, and
  the main purpose for this feature is to retain compatibility and
  data integrity with other OS-es, using the same disk array. Linux
  has its own Raid drivers, 
  *which you should use if you need better performance.*


-- 
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