The Monday 2005-02-28 at 18:02 -0900, John Andersen wrote:
Most raids I setup are software raids, and the root drive (with boot partition and linux software) are all non-raided, as is swap. All mission data files, is on the raid. I have a batch job copy certain files from /etc to a backup location on the raid nightly.
That way, I can upgrade the OS, without having to involve the raid. Yes, my OS drive is not protected, but it is fairly easy to rebuild, and I keep copies of critical files.
You may have / and /boot (if diferent) replicated on the other(s) disk, so that you can boot from the spare if needed. ...
If drivers are not present in your distro, I would consider software raid instead. Hardware raid always has to fight the driver wars, and it never gets any better than the day it was first installed. Software raid benefits from every processor/memory upgrade along the way, and gets better.
Some raid controllers can be jumper-ed to be regular dual channel ide controllers. That's the way I've been using mine.
It was said by somebody who knew, some time ago in this list, that so called hardware raid, on the motherboard, were not really hardware raid. I don't have the reference handy, though. -- Cheers, Carlos Robinson