On Thursday, Aug 7, 2003, at 14:15 Europe/Amsterdam, Dave Anderson wrote:
Switching to MD from ataraid, I'd advise to just let the kernel see two drives and forget about ataraid if you
want to go to MD. Ataraid devices are scary and currently do not properly flush hd write caches before
shutdown/reboot. They should be avoided unless you have a multiboot system with windows and want to
be able to use the drives on the ataraid while running linux.
Thanks for the detailed answer. So on a single Linux box, with no other OS, md really is the better choice over ataraid.
Will I be able to just disable the raid array, see two (identical) drives and set up md raid?
If you do not load the ataraid driver and do not set up raid in the controller bios, it
*should* act as a simple ide controller showing you two drives. Be aware you will
most likely have to repartition your disk(s) and loose all data on them.
Be aware. As I stated before, to my best knowledge (which is a bit dated) it is not
possible to set up a decent md configuration that supports booting from just one
of the two disks, replacing one of the two disks while running or rebuilding the
array while still running production. Again, I'd love to be proven wrong in this because
I use expensive hardware controllers quite frequently to overcome these problems.
If you want to be certain you can do all of these, either verify these conditions yourself,
or go for 3ware hardware IDE raid or similar.
Homme
