Looking at a new moboard but want to know about RAID

[Rastar]

I after reading a thread here am seriously looking at the Kernel Killer 400 from IWILL. They have two versions of this moboard one is IDE Raid.

My questions are what do I need special to use raid?

Why do I want RAID? (I don't have Roaches) ;D

What benefits does Raid provide a normal user who hosts muds and a small website?

Thanks
Ras

[Schotty]

Well with RAID you can mirror your drives and basically have (lets say 4 drives total for simplicity) the raid controller find out what is the quickest drive at that moment and read from that one. Of course SCSI RAID kicks the llama's ass. But IDE raid can be nifty for striping (1's on one drive, 0's on the other) for speed. Technically you double the throughput and halve the seek time. Note that is compared to real world results. Just because you may have ata133 doesn't mean a net 166MB/Sec throughput

You do NOT want RAID on a mobo, because it's likely to be software IDE RAID, which is slower than using the in kernel RAID driver in Linux.

The only thing Onboard raid normally is good for is Windows, because frankly Windows' IDE implementation bites the big one.

[Rastar]

Cool so I don't need a special Moboard to do raid just two or more working drives and my trusty Linux Distribution with of course RAID compiled into the kernel

Have a great weekend

Ras

[Kernel_Killer]

Actually, if you use Win2K, or XP Pro, you can also use software RAID. :P

Having the extra 2 controllers are nice though for more devices, but not for RAID itself.

[Schotty]

Well I did a quick search of my archives of the RedHat lists (from August to today), and on very many of them, Promise == naughty word.

PITA to get working, and at that not well.

Most mainboards use the Promise controllers for their IDE RAID (or at least did at that time)

[Kernel_Killer]

Yeah, they are still mainly Promise/Highpoint.

[Schotty]

Well with the inflood of new p4/xp mainboards being asked about on the redhat-list and on psyche-list, I kinda felt secure on this one. I hear some of the standalone cards are okay though. I will have to see which two were really getting great reccomendations.