On Fri, 2004-06-18 at 15:05, mdaly wrote: > greetings! > > the company i work for will be purchasing several PC-based servers.. > we're eyeing (either) mobo's with onboard SATA raid controllers or > SATA raid controller cards (ICH5 or Promise 20378 based)..i've read on > some forums that linux does not support hardware raid on these > controllers..a work around would be to disable hardware raid on the > controllers BIOS..linux will detect these HDs as "normal" IDE disks > therefore denying our purpose of using SATA HDs (faster transfer rates > than parallel ide, cheaper than SCSI HDs, btw, these servers would not > be "that" io intensive)..
Well, those cheap SATA RAID controllers are really doing the raid stuff on the driver or on some not so good firmware that's slow. And they don't provide RAID 5 too because RAID5 requires more processing power to compute the checksums. Those poor firmware RAID cards don't have enough processing power to do that. If you really want to use a real RAID controller for SATA, better get one of those 3ware SATA controllers instead which has a dedicated processor to do those RAID stuff. And BTW, SATA hard drives are IDE hard drives. They just have a serial interface. And there are no significant speed difference between SATA and PATA (Parallel ATA, plain EIDE or ATA, whatever you may want to call it) if you're using one device per channel on your PATA controller. And since SATA hard drives are still IDE drives, you still have the reliability of IDE drives. Unless of course you bought one of those 10k RPM Western Digital drives which are priced almost the same as SCSI drives. At that price, you'd rather buy a SCSI RAID setup. -- Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List [EMAIL PROTECTED] (#PLUG @ irc.free.net.ph) Official Website: http://plug.linux.org.ph Searchable Archives: http://marc.free.net.ph . To leave, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/plug . Are you a Linux newbie? To join the newbie list, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/ph-linux-newbie
