Re: Best Low-cost IDE RAID Solution For 2.6.x? (OT?)

["H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com>]

Followup to:  <1072647938.10298.3.camel@laptop.fenrus.com>
By author:    Arjan van de Ven <arjanv@redhat.com>
In newsgroup: linux.dev.kernel
> 
> On Sun, 2003-12-28 at 22:35, Johannes Ruscheinski wrote:
> 
> > Fisrt of all: thanks for the advice Joel!  Two questions: why not use the
> > hardware raid capability of the Promise tx4000 and if we'd use software
> > raid instead, what would be the CPU overhead?
> 
> be careful, almost all ata raid controllers out there are *software
> raid* hidden in a binary only driver. Also generally the on-disk format
> of these is quite unfortionate resulting in slower access than linux
> software raid can do...
> 

Not to mention, well, *proprietary*.  Consider this: with Linux
swraid, you don't have to worry about your manufacturer discontinuing
your product or going out of business; as long as you can connect your
disks to a CPU using any kind of controller you can recover your
data.  If a proprietary RAID controller croaks, and you can't get
another one of the same brand/model, you might have no more data...

	-hpa

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