On 2003.07.18 20:40 Philipp Thomas wrote:
This interests me. Do you know of "further reading" material about it? Howtos, webpages?
I'm sorry, but I don't have anything at hand. It's just what I gathered over the years from making support and following discussions both internal to SuSE and on lists like lkml.
Ah! I was afraid that would be the case: each of us has his own area of expertise which is difficult to find documented. They call it experience, know-how... and this is a fast changing field.
BTW, the pdcraid and hptraid drivers in the kernel aren't driver in the normal sense but nothing more than md personalities, i.e. they make the disk layout the BIOS created understandable for the md (software RAID) driver. The real work is done by the software RAID driver.
Ok, then lets try to synthesize the ideas I'm getting. 1) Cheap raid cards, or motherboard things, are not really hardware raid solutions. 2) They need support from the OS as a driver, be it windows, Linux, whatever. 2b) They don't work as raid without such drivers 4) A "pseudo hardware raid" like this, with the proper personality, can (or could) be used both from windows and Linux - of course, if formated with a filesystem both understand. 5) They are probably less flexible than a Linux software raid. 6) They are perhaps faster :-? Am I approximately correct? Incorrect? -- Cheers, Carlos Robinson