Hi, I am considering buying a new Intel based Motherboard (875P chipset) with 2 RAID-Controller on Board: ICH5R and Promise PDC20378. I want to know if the RAID1 functionality of Intel's 875P Southbridge (ICH5R) is fully supported by Linux. I read that at the launch of the ICH5R only RAID0 was supported but by a BIOS update, RAID1 is now also available. Is the driver (if there is any) pre-alpha or has it somehow proved to be stable? Moreover I want to know if there are drivers for the Promise PDC20378. But here's another question: Let's assume those 2 RAID chips are perfectly supported by Linux and you would want to set up a fast RAID1 solution with e.g. 2* WD-Raptor SATA disks. There are 3 ways to do this: 1) Software RAID: Easy, no driver support needed, but would this be very CPU intensive? Moreover is grub already capable to load the kernel from a RAID1 device? Another disadvantage would be that during write operations the traffic between the CPU and the disk subsystem is doubled compared to a HW-RAID solution. 2) HW RAID with ICH5R: This variant has the advantage that the SATA-channels are directly connected to the Chipset and do not stress the PCI-bus. 3) HW RAID with Promise Theoretically the read speed of a RAID1 device should be double of a single disk. Anyway it seems that currently available HW-RAID1 solutions are even slower than a single disk. What would this be like with Linux SW-RAID? Would SW-RAID double the read-speed? What would you prefer? Moreover I would like to know which filesystem would suit best. For the HW-RAID solutions this should not make any difference but I heard that e.g. ReiserFS + Linux SW-RAID is quite slow. Best Regards, Hermann -- x1@aon.at GPG key ID: 299893C7 (on keyservers) FP: 0124 2584 8809 EF2A DBF9 4902 64B4 D16B 2998 93C7 - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
