[Sussex] Lots of IDE drives...

[Ronan Chilvers]

Hi folks

Thanks very much to all who responded to my question.  I've managed to
find an old 2 port ATA 66 card (promise chipset :-\ ) for free which
I'm going to have a play with.  I specifically want to learn more about
the software raid implementation in the Linux kernel.  This card should
let me hook up 6 drives (or 5 with a CDROM) which will be enough to
experiment with raid5.

Good point about the power supply though - I'll check it out.

Cheers

Ronan

On Tue, 20 Sep 2005 16:33:04 +0100
Jon Fautley <jfautley at redhat.com> wrote:

> 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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