SJS wrote: > begin quoting John H. Robinson, IV as of Sat, Dec 15, 2007 at 10:54:38PM > -0800: >>.. > Ah, okay. Big-system stuff.
Not necessarily, these days. There are lots of hardware raid implementations on cards that are (say) under $1K. I'm fuzzy on this but don't even (some of) the on-board raids provide a boot-time configuration interface. At one time, a few years ago, you had to look harder and pay more to find a hardware raid card that provided a software interface. We used one when I was working at a NAS manufacturer. The software interface might have been just a program that can be run after boot (sometimes via remote connection -- telnet or something), or it could have been a full-fledged api library that you could write your own interface to, which you want if you want to control it via your NAS management software. > > I don't think I was looking at the $10k and up stuff at the time. > Perhaps that was my mistake. > >> The RAID cards that I am using now don't require any host OS driver. You >> configure it by hitting F3 during the boot process, and managing that >> way. However, there is no way to know if a particular disk is suffering >> degradation unless your host system has the proper driver. > > That's what blinkenlights are for. :) > >> I forget the exact model number, but these are 3Ware SATA RAID cards. > > ...as in a controller card that plugs into a slot? > > Wouldn't a driver still be needed? The cheaper ones just use a boot time bios extension, and expose the raid as a scsi device. Often you can disable the raid (on some or all) disks controlled by that card, and they then appear as individual disks (JBOD mode). Regards, ..jim -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
