Hello, my last post was asking if anyone had any recent experience with installing a fresh system using the redhat 8.0 drivers off the highpoint website for the HPT374 chipset. I am in the position of designing a new server that has to run RAID. (either RAID-1 or RAID-5). I am buying all new hardware from scratch for it so I need to be sure I am minimizing any possible headache's with the install. Basically I need a board with 4 IDE ports on it, and a BIOS setting that allows me to disable the onboard RAID function without losing access to IDE3 and IDE4. Originally, I was looking at the ABIT AT7 MAX, with the onboard HighPoint HPT374 chipset. I can't get that board so I have switched to the Gigabyte 7VAXP. The Gigabyte board is using the Promise PDC20276 controller, which I see by this list people have been having some difficulties with. My question is this: I am going to be using RedHat 8.0, but I am not going to be utilizing the onboard BIOS for controlling the RAID. I would rather use the kernel level md raid drivers, and use the raidtools package from within the OS. I am going to be installing 2 Maxtor 80gig drives, one on IDE3 and one on IDE4. but then in the BIOS I will set them as regular disks. When people are having the problems during the installation of linux, are their problems due to the fact that they are using the onboard RAID controller to build and maintain their array? Which then has to communicate with the kernel to "translate" what's going on.? OR since I am going to be disabling the RAID function onboard and relying on the md drivers from the kernel, am I effectively sidestepping any problems? (I'm thinking that just the simple fact that the drives are even plugged into IDE3 and IDE4 there is still a possible issue with communicating with the promise chip.. even though its not actually doing anything with the raid.) list, are you guys using the promise RAID controller to build and maintain your RAID? or using software raid via linux.
