<quote who="Karun">
> Has anybody used any IDE raid controller cards at all? What do people
> think about the one they have if any? Im planning on buying one, but not
> sure which one to get/use.
I'm not a huge fan of IDE RAID under Linux (especially if it's 'fake' RAID
with those HighPoint and Promise chipsets some motherboard manufacturers are
shipping, but there are proper RAID cards too), my choices would be between:
- Hardware RAID on SCSI for serious performance, safety and ease of use
(usually pretty expensive, hardware RAID adapters do not come cheap)
- Software RAID on SCSI for budget performance/safety (you can just go
with a 'normal' inexpensive SCSI controller, or two if you're paranoid
(multiple I/O) or handling lots of disks and need a lot of throughput)
- Software RAID on IDE for ultra-low-budget performance/safety (way
inexpensive, and you can purchase PCI controller cards to run a whole
bunch of disks should you require it)
If you're just looking for a simple way of having single disk redundancy,
and are not too concerned with increasing write performance, RAID-1 on IDE
is a good choice. You probably won't even need an additional controller
card, as you can run the two disks on the primary and secondary masters.
Redundancy with RAID is pretty simple, but as soon as you want to get some
performance and space benefits (RAID-5, RAID-0+1), it's generally easier to
go up to SCSI.
Having said all of that... :-) rpmfind.net runs on 3ware IDE RAID for
redundancy and speed, and was the testbed for a lot of interesting kernel
changes (things like network drivers, I/O changes and ext3).
- Jeff
--
"The plural of lego is legouch, from when you tread on those plural on
the floor in bare feet." - Telsa Gwynne
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