Hardware RAID in Linux (fwd)

[John Duff <jfduff@xxxxxxx>]

Yes it's possible.  Some motherboards come with a built-in RAID controller
(usually IDE I guess), but you could always buy a third-party PCI RAID
controller card, either for IDE or SCSI.  What do you mean, by "configure
hardware raid"?  Does this mean you have the required hardware already and
want to know how to set it up, or are thinking of buying some?  I've set-up
hardware RAID using an onboard IDE-RAID chip (via the BIOS), so that in 
effect it was invisible to Linux (all four hard drives looked like one
big one).  But that setup was tempermental, so I ended up using software
RAID using the 0.90 RAID layer in the 2.4.x kernels.  That worked fine,
until I discovered I had one of the VIA mobos/chipsets that don't like high
IDE data-rates.  But that was a hardware issue, the software RAID worked
great.  Unless you are building a production server, where you would want
a dedicated SCSI RAID card (which I know is supported in Linux, but the
hardware, mobo+card, costs quite a bit), I'm sure that using software RAID
with IDE drives would be perfect (like for a home system where you want
the backup/redundancy benefits of RAID at IDE prices).  Here is a link for 
the HOWTO on the software RAID:

http://unthought.net/Software-RAID.HOWTO/Software-RAID.HOWTO.html

-John


> 
> Anyone know of anyway to configure hardware raid in linux? Is it
> possible? Any other info needed to be known? Let me know.
> 
> 
>