On Mon, 22 Jan 2007, David Zakar wrote:
[snip]
I know this isn't going to be well-received advice by some folks, but I'd
recommend a switch to RHEL, CentOS, or Fedora. I know for a fact that all of
those have excellent support for RAID (and LVM) in their installers (both GUI
and text), making setup a snap.
Yeah, looking around I got the impression that Fedora/Redhat and SUSE have
the best RAID support for Linux, presumably due to their enterprise focus.
I'm not crazy about switching to Fedora (I've liked debian and Ubuntu and
it's what I'm used to), but it seems like it may be the best solution.
[snip]
If you're planning on running RAID 0, be sure you understand the inherent
risks involved. And back up regularly! :)
Yeah, I get that the failure rate is higher (a little less than twice as
high in this case), but it's ok since I'm going to be regularly backing up
important data on an old EIDE disk.
Thanks for the input!
-DMZ
Quoting Nick Cummings <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
I was recently given a new mobo with an nForce chipset that claimed to
have a RAID controller and two identical SATA drives with the idea that
I could use it for a RAID0. Before being given this setup, I hadn't
really given a lot of thought to running a RAID, but I'm thinking its
at least now worth a try.
After doing a bit of reading, it appears that the "RAID controller" on
the mobo is actually a so-called "fake RAID" that needs a driver which
actually implements much of the RAID functionality. My options then
were to try to find a working driver for Linux or to use a straight
software RAID. Anyone have any idea how the two of these compare?
I read several claims that the software RAID in Linux is as fast or
faster than most of these fake RAIDs, but I remain a bit skeptical.
Anyone know about that? Stuff I read seemed to suggest that one
downside of the fake RAID is that it could only be read by that chipset
(or a similar one) while the software RAID could be read by any system
with Linux (and appropriate modules). I know an upside of fake RAID is
that if you're dual booting it can be read by Windows, but I'm not dual
booting, so this is a non-issue.
I initially chose to go with the software RAID, thinking it would be
easier and more compatible, but I'm having a hell of a time getting
Ubuntu to setup the RAID and install. Right now my system won't boot
properly (seems it does not like having / on a RAID). So I have an
opportunity to reconsider my decision.
Another related question is whether anyone know how the performance
compares of having two ordinary swap partitions set to the same
priority versus having a RAID0 swap partition using the two disk? Is
one significantly better than the other? Is neither all that useful?
Finally, since Ubuntu's support for setting up a RAID at install seems
pretty bad, can anyone suggest distributions in which this goes more
smoothly? All things being equal, I probably prefer debian-based
distros, since that's what I'm familiar with.
Thanks,
Nick
