[Sussex] Lots of IDE drives...

[Jon Fautley]

Alan Pope wrote:
> 
> Do note though that promise cards are not really hardware raid. They
> still present a raid set to the OS as individual disks. The driver in
> windows actually does the raid in software. Same goes for Linux.

Agreed - the cards are nothing more than a standard IDE card with a
special NVRAM chip that controls the drive RAID scheme. You'll often
find this sort of 'RAID' referred to as 'HostRAID' or something along
those lines.

You're better off using your distributions native RAID subsystem (i.e.
Software RAID / md in the Linux kernel) on these disks. It'll provide
much better performance and stability (not to mention recoverability)
compared to the supplied drivers.

I know that the Promise IDE RAID drivers for Linux have caused a number
of Kernel panics and data corruption issues in the past. (certainly for
me and my customers)

Best Regards,

Jon
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