rrpalma@synopsis.ws mailto:rrpalma@synopsis.ws wrote:

Thanks for your help Joel!

Since I haven't bought the disks yet, what would your thoughts be on using SCSI instead of SATA? I remember somebody on the forum (perhaps it was you) telling me that Ultra320 was much faster that SATA.

If I decide to use SCSI, which medium end (as per price) Ultra320 RAID 0 adapter you for sure works with SuSE 9.1?

Regards from Lima, Perú! _____________________________ Ricardo R Palma SYNOPSIS SA

Tel. (+51 1) 275-7523, 275-4708 email: rrpalma@synopsis.ws

www.synopsis.ws

Joel Wiramu Pauling 07/05/2004 04:37 PM Torrpalma@synopsis.ws cc SubjectRe: [suse-amd64] Tyan K8W 2885, SuSE 9.1, GRUB, SATA, RAID 0 and WinXP

Hi There,

You will need a seperate non-raided partition for boot. I.e a 200MB slice of /dev/hda

Also for swap you need a non-raided partition. Again slice either 200mb of /dev/hda or /dev/hdc

Dual booting isn't an issue nor is grub. However, if you want to use raid in windows you are probably out of luck. From my knowledge the driver for the software raid depends on having the entiredisc allocated to a volume group through the raid "BIOS" utility.

If however you can specify to the windows driver to use partitions then it's as easy as leaving free space after you've created the linux software raid and boot paritions.

Kind regards

Joel

On Tue, 2004-07-06 at 09:27, rrpalma@synopsis.ws wrote: Hello all,

...

From previous postings, I've learned that it's possible to have RAID 0 and SATA on a Tyan Thunder K8W with the included Silicon Image RAID Accelerator (although in a manner similar to software RAID).

However, I still have some questions before I start assembling my system (the parts are coming in :-) ).

- Will I be able to use GRUB, or should I stick with LILO? - I need to dual boot between Linux, and unfortunately, Win XP. Can I have GRUB (or LILO) set up, and RAID 0, for both operating systems (obviously, on different partitions)? - Can I boot Linux from /boot on a RAID 0 partition? I'm currently doing this with SuSE 9 on Intel (32 bits), but have to use LILO....

Thank you VERY MUCH for your help and expertise.

Regards,

_____________________________ Ricardo R Palma SYNOPSIS SA

Tel. (+51 1) 275-7523, 275-4708 email: rrpalma@synopsis.ws

www.synopsis.ws

Ricardo, First I would ask are you sure you want to be running RAID 0? You have no safety net at all if a drive goes bad - you are hosed. Is the data not valuable? Or is this for transient data that is kept somewhere more secure? Certainly you get a certain percentage improvement in system throughput - but will you really tell the difference between .8 seconds and 1.2 seconds to perform a task. Now if it is a long-running process - the difference between 80 minutes and 120 minutes can be significant. And also consider that you can get Ultra320 drives that are incredibly fast compared to the fastest SATA drives (you can also get Ultra320 drives that are comparable to the fastest SATA drives). The Ultra320 drives we use (Fujitsu, but Hitachi, Seagate and others make good drives also) spin at 15,000 RPM and have 3.6 to 3.9 millisecond average access times. An they are much more reliable than the typical SATA drive. The best SATA drives I know of are the Western Digital Raptors - but they only spin at 10,000 RPM and have an average access time of over 5 milliseconds. The prices is somewhat cheaper than the Ultra320'S, but still a lot more expensive than typical SATA drives that spin at 7200 RPM. As far as a good Ultra320 controller, we are using the Intel SRCU42L in a dual Opteron box running SLES 8 for AMD64 - but I do not know if it will work on SuSE 9.1 Pro. Also, I'm not sure you would call it medium-level - at MonarchComputer.com it currently retails for around $475 US. I did find a number of lower priced intelligent (i.e. not the cheap BIOS-assist adapters) at New Egg, but you will need to check the SuSE hardware list to see if they are on it: http://www.newegg.com/app/Viewproduct.asp?Submit=list&catalog=410&DEPA=0 &order=PRICE&srchFor=RAID%20SCSI One way to save a little is to purchase one of the Tyan dual motherboards that is built accomodate a zero-channel RAID card. It fits in a special slot on the motherboard. They usually only take about 32MB of SDRAM, but that is enough for a workstation. The zero-channel cards are much less expensive - usually $130 to $230 US. I do realize it is frustrating trying to setup RAID for a combination Linux / Windows XP system - I know as I spent about two months trying to get the HPT374 chip drivers working. The builtin cheap RAID controllers appear to work well in Windows (you do not have a good software RAID to compare then to :). But when you compare them to a real RAID card with builtin RAM and dedicated processor they just do not hold up. That said, it is very nice to use the builtin motherboard RAID chips for mirroring of Windows workstations - why is it not that easy on Linux (I know driver support). All of our developer's that still use Windows workstations run RAID 1 now - a second hard drive is so cheap these days, and the cost of losing developer time because of a failed hard drive is so expensive. The Windows drivers give you the illusion of a completely mirrored hard drive - with Linux this is harder to achieve. Hope somebody else can give you some more specific advice. - Richard

1) NTFS write support is experimental at best. As for having it raid. Well no, the proprietary windows driver (if you can get it to work on a partition of the physical drives) Will make it impossible to use the partition under linux. I suggest you forget about raiding the windows partition, I Have a separate drive for windows, and I use fat32 not ntfs, to maintain good compatibility. However, if you do it the other way around. (Raid windows, not linux). Then there are windows drivers for ACCESSING (not writing) ext2/3 and reiserfs on the net. I have actually wondered if there is a windows driver available to access linux software raid devices. This is technically possible as all the software is opensource, but would be a fair amount of work for whoever writes the driver. Kind regards Joel On Tue, 2004-07-06 at 11:21, rrpalma@synopsis.ws wrote:

Thanks Richard / Joel for your advice.

It seems from your notes that I should be OK with using the built-in motherboard RAID (if i decide to use RAID 0 after all). I will be trying to get those Raptor drives...

The problem I seem to be facing now is configuring both Windows XP and SuSE 9.1 to dual boot, both using RAID 0 (if I use it), with a common data partition ....

Please help me out here: If I remember correctly, SuSE 9.1 can safely BOTH read and write to NTFS partitions? Can I have a RAID 0, NTFS formatted partition, that is both accessible from Linux and Windows?

THANKS! _____________________________ Ricardo R Palma SYNOPSIS SA

Tel. (+51 1) 275-7523, 275-4708 email: rrpalma@synopsis.ws

www.synopsis.ws

"Richard Mixon (qwest)" 07/05/2004 05:50 PM

To suse-amd64@suse.com cc

Subject RE: [suse-amd64] Tyan K8W 2885, SuSE 9.1, GRUB, SATA, RAID 0 and WinXP

rrpalma@synopsis.ws mailto:rrpalma@synopsis.ws wrote:

...

Thanks for your help Joel!

Since I haven't bought the disks yet, what would your thoughts be on using SCSI instead of SATA? I remember somebody on the forum (perhaps it was you) telling me that Ultra320 was much faster that SATA.

If I decide to use SCSI, which medium end (as per price) Ultra320 RAID 0 adapter you for sure works with SuSE 9.1?

Regards from Lima, Perú! _____________________________ Ricardo R Palma SYNOPSIS SA

Tel. (+51 1) 275-7523, 275-4708 email: rrpalma@synopsis.ws

www.synopsis.ws

Joel Wiramu Pauling 07/05/2004 04:37 PM Torrpalma@synopsis.ws cc SubjectRe: [suse-amd64] Tyan K8W 2885, SuSE 9.1, GRUB, SATA, RAID 0 and WinXP

Hi There,

You will need a seperate non-raided partition for boot. I.e a 200MB slice of /dev/hda

Also for swap you need a non-raided partition. Again slice either 200mb of /dev/hda or /dev/hdc

Dual booting isn't an issue nor is grub. However, if you want to use raid in windows you are probably out of luck. From my knowledge the driver for the software raid depends on having the entiredisc allocated to a volume group through the raid "BIOS" utility.

If however you can specify to the windows driver to use partitions then it's as easy as leaving free space after you've created the linux software raid and boot paritions.

Kind regards

Joel

On Tue, 2004-07-06 at 09:27, rrpalma@synopsis.ws wrote: Hello all,

...

From previous postings, I've learned that it's possible to have RAID 0 and SATA on a Tyan Thunder K8W with the included Silicon Image RAID Accelerator (although in a manner similar to software RAID).

However, I still have some questions before I start assembling my system (the parts are coming in :-) ).

- Will I be able to use GRUB, or should I stick with LILO? - I need to dual boot between Linux, and unfortunately, Win XP. Can I have GRUB (or LILO) set up, and RAID 0, for both operating systems (obviously, on different partitions)? - Can I boot Linux from /boot on a RAID 0 partition? I'm currently doing this with SuSE 9 on Intel (32 bits), but have to use LILO....

Thank you VERY MUCH for your help and expertise.

Regards,

_____________________________ Ricardo R Palma SYNOPSIS SA

Tel. (+51 1) 275-7523, 275-4708 email: rrpalma@synopsis.ws

www.synopsis.ws

Ricardo,

First I would ask are you sure you want to be running RAID 0? You have no safety net at all if a drive goes bad - you are hosed. Is the data not valuable? Or is this for transient data that is kept somewhere more secure?

Certainly you get a certain percentage improvement in system throughput - but will you really tell the difference between .8 seconds and 1.2 seconds to perform a task. Now if it is a long-running process - the difference between 80 minutes and 120 minutes can be significant.

And also consider that you can get Ultra320 drives that are incredibly fast compared to the fastest SATA drives (you can also get Ultra320 drives that are comparable to the fastest SATA drives). The Ultra320 drives we use (Fujitsu, but Hitachi, Seagate and others make good drives also) spin at 15,000 RPM and have 3.6 to 3.9 millisecond average access times. An they are much more reliable than the typical SATA drive. The best SATA drives I know of are the Western Digital Raptors - but they only spin at 10,000 RPM and have an average access time of over 5 milliseconds. The prices is somewhat cheaper than the Ultra320'S, but still a lot more expensive than typical SATA drives that spin at 7200 RPM.

As far as a good Ultra320 controller, we are using the Intel SRCU42L in a dual Opteron box running SLES 8 for AMD64 - but I do not know if it will work on SuSE 9.1 Pro. Also, I'm not sure you would call it medium-level - at MonarchComputer.com it currently retails for around $475 US. I did find a number of lower priced intelligent (i.e. not the cheap BIOS-assist adapters) at New Egg, but you will need to check the SuSE hardware list to see if they are on it:

http://www.newegg.com/app/Viewproduct.asp?Submit=list&catalog=410&DEPA=0 &order=PRICE&srchFor=RAID%20SCSI

One way to save a little is to purchase one of the Tyan dual motherboards that is built accomodate a zero-channel RAID card. It fits in a special slot on the motherboard. They usually only take about 32MB of SDRAM, but that is enough for a workstation. The zero-channel cards are much less expensive - usually $130 to $230 US.

I do realize it is frustrating trying to setup RAID for a combination Linux / Windows XP system - I know as I spent about two months trying to get the HPT374 chip drivers working. The builtin cheap RAID controllers appear to work well in Windows (you do not have a good software RAID to compare then to :). But when you compare them to a real RAID card with builtin RAM and dedicated processor they just do not hold up.

That said, it is very nice to use the builtin motherboard RAID chips for mirroring of Windows workstations - why is it not that easy on Linux (I know driver support). All of our developer's that still use Windows workstations run RAID 1 now - a second hard drive is so cheap these days, and the cost of losing developer time because of a failed hard drive is so expensive. The Windows drivers give you the illusion of a completely mirrored hard drive - with Linux this is harder to achieve.

Hope somebody else can give you some more specific advice.

- Richard