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 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]