[luau] storage - need raid?

[Warren Togami]

On Thu, 2003-09-25 at 13:38, tom_gordon at notes.k12.hi.us wrote:
> 320G (maxtor) IDE drives run as low as $300.
> 
> Getting four 250G WD SE hard drives and using linux software raid (or 
> hardware if you wanna spend extra) should cost you well under $1000.
> 
> tom

Make sure you have one independent IDE channel per drive.  Never use
master and slave with IDE RAID because one drive tends to kill the other
on the same channel when it dies.

Since your motherboard probably doesn't have four IDE channels which you
can dedicate to four drives, you may need to add a PCI ATA add-on card. 
Cheap Promise Ultra133 cards would do fine for this purpose.

http://3ware.com/
Otherwise there really is only one brand of real hardware IDE RAID from
3Ware.

Do NOT attempt to use Promise or High Point Tech IDE RAID with Linux, as
they are poorly supported, SLOW, and not really hardware RAID, but
poorly implemented software RAID implemented in the OS drivers.  Native
Linux software RAID is faster and more reliable than Promise or HPT for
RAID.

Warren