Okay, but that raises the question of under what circumstances SHOULDI (or anyone for that matter) use ataraid ?
If you have a dual boot system that is running windows.
because......... <guess> because it has to keep the same structure on the disks as the windows hpt driver, and <guess> md mirrors them ... differently ?
If I remove the RAID set in the HPT BIOS, the only disadvantage I can see is that it won't be able to automatically 'fail' the boot device to the other drive, but since the HPT BIOS comes up with a big warning screen that you have to interact with when it boots and finds a broken raid set, there's no advantage at all (I may as well interact with it and set the boot drive to the other disk if necessary myself)
The only difference that there seems to be between a plain dual channel HPT IDE controller and a "raid" controller is the software in its BIOS (allows the drives to be initially copied or striped), and the disk drivers you're meant to use in windows. Does that sound right ?
and grub won't be a problem.. I'm using lilo anyway, I assume that I should tell lilo my boot device is the md device, which causes lilo to write it to all members of the md mirror.
I think I'll go find the linux raid faq now.
