On Tue, 15 Jan 2008, Matthew S. Hallacy wrote:
> If you need high data availability, don't cheap out with some pseudo
> software RAID controller.
Now you have my interest. We just bought a computer with an Asus P5N-E
SLI mother board and we installed Ubuntu GG on it. The mobo specs say
"Support RAID0, 1, 0+1, 5, and JBOD," which seems to imply a hardware
RAID, but I read this on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID
Inexpensive RAID controllers have become popular that are simply a
standard disk controller with a BIOS extension implementing RAID in
software for the early part of the boot process. A special operating
system driver then takes over the raid functionality when the system
switches into protected mode.
Because these controllers often try to give the impression of being
hardware RAID controllers, they are generally known as Fake
RAID.[1][2][3][4][5] They do actually implement genuine RAID; the only
faking is that they do it in software.
(but that is what it used to say two weeks ago and now it is slightly
different).
So I thought I'd use that "fake RAID" method until I was told that Linux
software RAID was just as good and that the BIOS RAID was really only for
Windows:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/FakeRaidHowto
Then we used these instructions...
http://users.piuha.net/martti/comp/ubuntu/en/raid.html
...and decided to use the softRAID approach.
We got that to work. I don't know if this is a "pseudo software RAID
controller" and I don't need to "cheap out" because it isn't my money!
So should I be buying a hardware RAID controller? How much will that cost
me? What is the benefit of the hardware RAID over softRAID?
Mike