Re: [tlug] Pasokon Koubou

[Stephen Lee <sl@example.com>]

Botond Botyanszki <9915104t@example.com> wrote:
> Jonathan Byrne wrote:
> > onboard Promise RAID (0 and 1),
> any experience with IDE RAID? Recently there was an article on /. about this,
> the comments were kinda mixed.

The computer I'm writing this has a pair of mirrored IDE disks.  I had
disks from IBM, Maxtor, and Seagate fail on me within last year.  Not
completely, but S.M.A.R.T. errors (at least they made THAT right), and I
am able to get the data off the disks before getting a replacement, but
these experience is enough to make me not trust recent hardware.

With the harddisk manufacturers cutting warranty on most disks to 1
year (and you probably get less if you buy bulk from Akihabara), it is
apparaent that they don't trust their hardware, as well.

On the topic of RAID cards, I have used cards based on HPT370, SIL0680
and Promise Fasttrack 100. I believe all of these are 'firmware/driver'
RAID cards, i.e. the card is not much more than a few IDE channels, the
RAID part is done with firmware/driver and runs on your CPU.  It has the
convinence that you can boot from a stripe set, but not more if you use
linux's software RAID.  There isn't much to gain from using such a card
except that you get more IDE channels, which can be nice sometimes.

Now, the BIOS/drivers' (for a certain non-linux OS that shall remain
unnamed) quality vary.  HPT is kind of hit or miss, I had problems with
IRQ sharing and ACPI.  For a second machine I first got SIL which is
cheap and crap. I tried to add a disk and use it to mirror the existing
one, and as far as I can tell the driver insists on finishing the mirror
before letting me boot. So I left the computer on and went to sleep. It
didn't finish after half a day. I'm not going to spent half a day on
mirroring if one of my disk breaks, so I got a promise and it works well
for me (but it is relatively expensive).

Oh, I also second (third?) the opinion that it is better to build your
own.  Not so much for upgradability (usually there will be better
motherboard/RAM by the time you want to upgrade your CPU, for example),
but so that you know what component are going into your PC, and can get
parts that works well with linux.

Stephen