[luau] Donations Needed for Server Upgrades

[Warren Togami]

On Sun, 2003-07-27 at 14:33, Matthew John Darnell wrote:
> Warren,
> 
> >  Here is a list of hardware that we need to buy:
> >
> > * (Critical) Several large IDE hard drives and 3Ware RAID controller.
> 
> 
> I will donate a hard drive, I get a lot of stuff off Videl.
> 
> What size, and manufacturer are you looking for?  I can scrape up an IDE
> RAID card if you need it - not sure if it is Linux supported, works well
> under Windows.
> 
> -Matt

As for disk size and manufacturer, that will be decided when we receive
all the donations and make the purchase so we can have uniform disks.

For the RAID controller the vast majority of IDE RAID controllers
usually from Promise or High Point Tech must be avoided.  Their
manufacturers have refused to cooperate with Linux kernel developers in
the past years so driver support is terrible, and also they are NOT read
hardware RAID like they claim.  They are really software RAID
(implemented in the OS drivers) with a BIOS hook to make it bootable. 
To make matters worse they have been historically both more unstable,
unsafe, and slower than native software RAID of both Windows and Linux.

http://www.amdforums.com/forumdisplay.php?s=&forumid=29
Search this forum for "RAID" and hear the multitudes of pain and
suffering from Promise and HPT "hardware IDE RAID".  It is just not
worth it.

As of a few months ago the only good hardware IDE RAID for Windows or
Linux (with real open source drivers included by distributions) was made
by 3Ware, but I believe there may be more on the market now.  Will need
to research more into this.

Warren