From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Hans Reiser Subject: Re: Promise raid controller writes to disk, anybody know where? Date: Thu, 17 Apr 2003 05:48:19 +0400 Message-ID: <3E9E07E3.3050908@namesys.com> References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: list-help: list-unsubscribe: list-post: Errors-To: flx@namesys.com In-Reply-To: List-Id: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format="flowed" To: bscott@ntisys.com Cc: ReiserFS Mailing List 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