Michael Steinhart wrote:
Yesterday I posted a request to the ataraid list for information about using and setting-up ATARAID controllers on servers. The only response that I got was NOT to use ATARAID but to use software raid. I am sure that there is more information then that available.Ok, lets try it...
Software raid is not the solution that I need to use.
This is not an attack on anyone just a request for HELP.
Mike ______________________________________________________________
Michael Steinhart OPCenter mike@xxxxxxxxxxxx PMH Network Services, Inc. http://www.opcenter.net 284 Ackerman Ave Emerson, NJ 07630
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First of all, there is no driver disk available so far, at least no one that works. That is not a problem of the driver itself but of the installer. It only recognises the ide-devices (e.g. /dev/hde and /dev/hdg) but not the raid-partitions that are set up in the controller bios. I build a driver disk a few weeks ago and it works as far as the ataraid-devices (/dev/ataraid/d0pX) are concerned, but the installer is on the cd and I can´t fix it. So you only have ataraid-support in the rescue session.
Stability: I use the ataraid-drivers in 2.4.12-ac5 (raid0) since several weeks and had NO problem. So far...
Arjan (who wrote the driver) said about this:
So maybe there is no problem if your server only should support raid0, but even for this I would not use it in a production system.I'd really recommend using the normal linux software raid (md) for production use for now.... ata software raid 1 doesn't do failure handling yet...
Speed: I can not realy compare the performance of the md devices and the ataraid devices, but if I test the performance of the ataraid partition with bonnie++ it is slower than the vfat partition in dos mode. And even the performance of the /dev/hde and /dev/hdg together is much better than the one of the ataraid device. So I guess if you use the linux build-in raid0 the dissks are much faster than with ataraid.
So if you really want to build a server with linux, there is no need to use the ataraid drivers, because the linux md drivers are much more developed.
I hope I could help you.
Greetings Helge.
