Re: Promise raid controller writes to disk, anybody know where?

[Hans Reiser <reiser@namesys.com>]

bscott@ntisys.com wrote:

>On Wed, 16 Apr 2003, at 8:54pm, reiser@namesys.com wrote:
>  
>
>>It is for my Mom, I want both windows and Linux, and I was hoping the
>>whole drive would get mirrored by the hardware.
>>    
>>
>
>  Not by hardware, no.  But you could configure a mirror in the Promise 
>BIOS, and it would give you an effective mirror of two drives, regardless of 
>OS or partitioning.  You would need to have drivers for all your OSes, of 
>course.  This isn't "hardware RAID", but it still might be useful.
>
This is total crap and deceitful marketing, in my book.  Nowhere do they 
say it is software raid....

>
>  That being said, I've also had bad luck with many of these cheap "fake 
>RAID controllers" doing things like corrupting the contents of the drive.  
>While I'm not saying your particular model of Promise controller will have 
>that problem, I've been burned often enough that I won't touch them.
>
>  If you really want a hardware RAID controller for ATA drives, go with a
>3Ware Escalade, or an LSI Logic MegaRAID I4.  Both have fully supported, GPL
>drivers in the kernel.  I've also heard that the high-end Promise
>controllers (the ones that have an actual co-processor onboard) are decent,
>although I have no experience with them myself.
>
I didn't intend to buy it, it is built into the motherboard, sigh....  
the motherboard can support only 3 ide devices, so I would say it is IDE 
lacking as a result of the promise device....

I didn't really pay attention to the ide device capacity when buying it.....

oh well, not the end of the world.

>
>  
>
>>It is okay though, I will have mom use dd once a week to do it, and this
>>will protect from viruses better than a synchronous mirror.
>>    
>>
>
>  rsync might be better than a simple 'dd'.  Although I don't know if rsync
>would get messed up by the semantics of an MS-DOS filesystem.
>
>  
>


-- 
Hans