Hi There was some discussion about this a while back. There were some tests done and IIRC the promise controler had better performance when used as a standard IDE controller using the linux software raid. Again IIRC the raid "firmware" on the card actually just enables a BIOS extension and the raid runs in BIOS. Since the raid is not running in hardware on the card, but uses the system processor, this could be defined as software raid. The fact that it comes from an eprom and runs as a BIOS program does not negate the fact that it uses the system processor. True hardware raid does all of its processing on the card itself with it's own processor. This type of raid card is equivilent to a soft modem in the modem category. If you want a good ATA RAID card, the best I have researched are from 3ware. 3ware also actively supports linux and there drivers are in the maintained in the kernel source. There have been benchmark tests and the 3ware ATA RAID cards blew everyone out of the water in RAID mode and in JBOD mode. Guy Charles A. Crayne wrote: > On Thu, 16 Jan 2003 17:03:54 -0500 Michael George <george@mutualdata.com> > wrote: > > :Are you sure that the FastTrack 100 TX2 is actually software RAID? If > that's :the case, why wouldn't one just put one drive on each of their MB > ATA :controllers and run software RAID on the system? > > It is NOT software RAID from the point of view of the linux kernel, and > there is a separate hardware controller for the IDE RAID arrays [which can > be disabled by a physical jumper] than there is for non-RAID IDE drives, > but Peter feels that since it takes a device driver to make the RAID array > look like a single drive, then it should be called software RAID. > > -- Chuck > > > -- Psyche-list mailing list Psyche-list@redhat.com https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/psyche-list
