On Tuesday 03 August 2004 01:31 am, Niclas Arndt wrote:
You should only use 1 drive per IDE channel, set up as master. The way IDE is designed, a broken slave might well bring the whole channel down.
Highly unlikely. Just as likely that a broken master would do in the channel, but thousands of years of (collective) service with ide drives indicate this is extremely rare. Having that broken slave is going to take something down anyway. The prohibition against having two drives on the same controller channel for software raid is based _solely_ on performance, because the channel can talk to one drive at a time. As far as I know you are the only person who has made any claim that one-drive per channel offers any protection against failing drives. Care to cite a reference? But since the OP stated he was using this for movie storage, and the demands there-of are not sufficient to saturate even the slowest IDE hard drive bandwidth, building two arrays, one of all slaves and the other of all masters is quite viable. The only slow operations would then be copying a movie from one array to the other, and even that would be no slower than copying from master to slave in a two drive machine with no raid. -- _____________________________________ John Andersen