I have been using software RAID for just under a year now on a system I built myself. My board is a Gigabyte GA-8IHXP2 with the full Promise RAID chip. I just turned the chip based RAID off in favor of having 2 extra IDE connectors and implementing software RAID using drives plugged into them. I have not regretted that. It has all been transparent.
I just did add a third hard drive to this particular machine because I need to work in Windows 2000 as well. That has changed my RAID configuration, and I learned more about software RAID in the process. No regrets there. The change also affected my Grub bootloader configuration, and I'm still figuring out how to work through that -- Michael Young and a colleague of his posted a web page on this subject and I need to sit down and try out their suggestions.
But to make a long story short, don't bother with the Promise controller. Use software RAID.
Bob Cochran
Jesse Keating wrote:
On Friday 29 August 2003 16:59, Dylon wrote:
Jesse, Besides the fact that I cant get it to work, why would you not use it? Known Problems, crappy hardware, unsupported hardware, etc. I guess I just need something to back my reason for not using it.
Promise raid cards are the winmodem of raid controllers. It really does very little processing on the chip itself, rather sends processes off to the system processor through a driver to accomplish raid operations. The card was written from the ground up to be a windows card, and the Linux drivers have never been very stable. Promise is very heavy handed tactics when it comes to trying to develop OSS drivers, requiring anybody/everybody to sign pretty heafty NDAs. Software raid will perform better and be more reliable.
-- Shrike-list mailing list Shrike-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/shrike-list
