> the motivation behind my question is that it's not clear to me that there is > such a thing as pure hardware raid. if someone knows of something that > implements the entire read/write path without a cpu, even with a degraded > or rebuilding raid, i'd be very interested in that.
Ahh, I see what you mean. I agree that probably there is no such thing as RAID purely implemented in hardware. I think for most people the hardware epithet is used to describe a black box where the user doesn't have access to it's internal gearing, be it hardware or software. A microwave is a hardware device for its users because the users don't need to care if the unit has firmware, discrete electronics or mechanical gears. Probably a better term would be to always use the term appliance, instead of this hardware/softare false dichotomy. > (see wiki's raid article.) Plan 9 wiki? It mentions SiL 3112 SATA, 3114 SATA/RAID and VIA 82C686, VT8237 SATA/RAID, strangely, under IDE section. I haven't found yet relevant information about the SiL stuff, but the VIA stuff is what Adaptec calls HostRAID and Linux fakeRAID. A Happy New Year! -- Aram Hăvărneanu
