On Sun, 3 Nov 2002, Rick Moen wrote:
> Quoting Ian C. Sison ([EMAIL PROTECTED]):
>
> > Promise makes a good IDE controller....
>
> I'd still not trust important data to ATA ("IDE") at all, but, if I were
> for some reason obliged to use ATA hardware RAID, I'd insist on 3Ware,
> since those are the only ones with a halfway-decent track record.
Amen.
> On the other hand, if the motherboard ATA chipset is decent and you need
> only two hard drives, then buy a cheap PCI ATA adapter for your CD
> drive, and save the cost of hardware RAID.
'Decent' means several things :
1. that the ATA IDE chipset actually is a good, well designed, and fully
featured
2. that the Linux driver is stable, and supports the abovementioned
features
You may have #1, but #2 is missing, for instance, the serverworks driver
(serverworks being the premiere chipset used by compaq, etc for server
motherboards) of linux sucks. When it encounters a bad sector in the
drive, it panics the kernel. Duh.
> Oh, by the way, about those round ATA cables that supposedly cure ATA
> RAID's airflow-impeding problem: Were you aware that they completely
> destroy the alternation of signal and ground cables that is a deliberate
> and crucial design feature of ribbon cabling? Typical ATA "engineering".
Gee, this is bad. I have these buggers. URL for more info on this? So far
i haven't encountered any problems on my setup which uses rounded IDE
cables for both my 3ware and promise cards.
> > ...and you are sure you can get linux to do UDMA 66++ on each drive.
>
> That's a so-called DMA mode that's still processor-intensive. The 66
> MB/sec theoretical bus limit is worthwhile, in that it means saturating
> the bus during ideal-case reads becomes impossible rather than merely
> very unlikely.
As previously discussed in older threads of this subject \8)
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