Re: [Sheflug] RAID Cards

[Alex Hudson <home [at] xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 2004-04-14 at 09:42, Darrell Blake wrote:
> What defines a RAID card then? According to the description it says it 
> has a RAID controller and supports RAID0 and RAID1.

Yeah, but it's done in software. That makes it no better in real terms
than any other additional IDE controller; Linux does software RAID
natively anyway, and it's usually faster than proprietary software RAID
(at least, it was last time I looked). 

The only hardware RAID cards I know of are the 3ware ones, but you're
paying a lot more than a tenner for one of those.

>  > What's wrong with PATA?
> 
> By PATA do you mean ATA133 and such? If so then the reason I'm looking 
> at going for an SATA drive is because it's supposed to be taking over. 
> My motherboard doesn't have support for SATA so I'm kind of future 
> proofing myself by getting an SATA drive.

To be honest, I'm always extremely doubtful of 'future proofing'
hardware.

If the £15 or so you save not buying a controller can be put toward a
faster PATA drive, I would go for that option. Or, get more disk space
if speed isn't important. SATA is new, the current hardware isn't great,
the support is rubbish, and having to boot off of secondary IDE systems
(cards, whatever) is always a pain - I used to do it. If the mainline
kernel doesn't have support for it, for example, you can always
recompile one that has, but once you move your main HD onto that
secondary controller if anything goes wrong you're basically screwed.

Cheers,

Alex.

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