[wplug] raid?

[Procario, Michael]

You can now get hardware raid in IDE. Promise and 3ware make ide raid
controllers. The disks will be significantly cheaper than SCSI. I haven;t
done it myself. Search for IDE raid on Google and you will find a lot of
info.

Mike

-----Original Message-----
From: harrold at sage.che.pitt.edu [mailto:harrold at sage.che.pitt.edu]
Sent: Friday, March 23, 2001 5:11 PM
To: wplug at wplug.org
Subject: Re: [wplug] raid?


On Sat, 24 Mar 2001, thrift wrote:

> I am attempting to build my first computer right now, and would like to
> have a striping raid on it.  Does anyone know of any raid cards that are
> easy to set up for linux/FBSD/win2k?  I already ordered the mother board
> before I made the decision to have a raid, so it would have to be PCI.
> Also, I would appreciate it if anyone could warn me if they are aware of
> any possible encountered problems with a striping raid on any of these
> OSs.  I really have no experience with raids at all, so anything would
> help me.

well you can go two ways. you can get a card to do hardware raid
(can be pretty expensive). this means that the raid is setup inside the
bios of the scsi card and the operating system sees the disks as a single
drive. if the os supports the card, then your os can see the raid. the
other is a software raid. the controllers required for doing software
raids are much cheaper, but it adds to the overhead of the os. this is
because the os must support the overhead of the io for the raid. 

which ever you choose depends alot on what you are doing. i've done a
software raid in nt and linux using my adaptec 2940uw. adaptecs cards are
usually more expensive, and i dont know that they provide any more for the
buck. i've heard alot of good things about mylex (formerly 
buslogic). their low end raid controllers are pretty inexpensive ~
$100-200.

i had a friend who had one of these. it was buslogic flashpoint card
(bt950 or something like that). it would do a hardware raid-i think he
tried it out in windows 9x. i'm not sure if they make these anymore. its
in the archived products section, but one person still has them on price
watch. the next step of for mylex is in the $300-400 range.

are you making a server or are you just playing around?

for more info on raids check out the faq's on mylex's site.
http://www.mylex.com/solutions/aboutrdr.html


-- 
john

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