Re: [SLE] New MB opinions

On Wednesday July 16 2003 3:47 pm, Philipp Thomas wrote:

Richard [Wed, 16 Jul 2003 13:26:55 -0700]:

...

Does anyone have any opinions (really opening up here) between the MSI K7N2Delta ILSR motherboard and the Gigabyte 7N400 Pro? Both seem to be good by reviews. I am concerned with Gigabyte raid controller, though a Gigabyte rep. says they supply a Redhat linux driver with the supplied setup disk.

There's *nothing* in these cheap RAID controllers (sometimes called fakeRAID) that you can't achieve with the Linux software RAID driver, unless you want to run M$ on the same system. These controllers are not much more then simple ATA controllers with additional functionality in the BIOS. All of the RAID logic is implemented in the driver, i.e. in software.

So if you only want to run Linux on the system, just use the controllers as normal ATA ones and let the Linux md (software RAID) driver do the work.

Philipp

Thanks for your response, Philipp. In fact, I do now run both WinXP (required by a specific program I use), and SuSE on the same system. I use four drives, all 40G. Two are striped and run Windoze with a graphics program not available or runnable in linux, yet. It allows me to film my athletes (swimmers) and then juxtapose and time those films with either other athletes or with "model" films of other elite athletes. Pretty neat really. Running as one 80G drive means I do not have to do anything funny to access files/films and it stores and accesses files/films a little bit quicker (albeit very little, but a little). The other two drives run SuSE 8.0 and are mirrored since I am not concerned about space for my linux system but I am concerned with data integrity. I have a Highpoint 372 (fakeRAID) chip running now to do this and it seems pretty solid and works for both setups. Back then to my question about the MB's: the Gig. has more ide connectors allowing easier setup of all this, while the MSI has a chip (Promise) that I suspect might be better supported and maybe more stable and have more accessible drivers. So I am a little up in the air over which may be the better solution. Any feelings over linux support from either manufacturer? Any feelings about whether there may be any concerns about using a driver written for Redhat? Answers seem simple to me but I really do not want to go spend a lot of money to make some new discoveries later and have a closet stacked with one more unusable MB. Thanks again. Richard