> i have the same question that ken has - given the relative slowness > of ide, and since i'm only doing this for redundancy, not for > performance, is there any reason to buy an ide raid card? or is > software raid sufficient for this kind of use?
IDE is not particularly slow, it's just that heavy IDE activity tends to make the system unresponsive to other processes (like user requests). the 2.4.21 kernel supposedly makes some improvements in this area, although i haven't tried them out yet (i really ought to since i'm running 2.4.21 on my laptop with severn). so for a dedicated backup box i wouldn't let IDE's "slowness" stand in your way, even with software raid. go for it! true story: last year i was called in to fix a system that used software raid 1 on a data partition (but not the other partitions). one of the disks had failed and the system would no longer boot. i slapped a knoppix cd in the drive, brought it up, mounted the remaining raid partition, and scp'd the data to another system. software raid 1 is a good thing :-) jason -- TriLUG mailing list : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug TriLUG Organizational FAQ : http://trilug.org/faq/ TriLUG Member Services FAQ : http://members.trilug.org/services_faq/ TriLUG PGP Keyring : http://trilug.org/~chrish/trilug.asc
