>On Mon, 2003-11-24 at 22:39, Jeroen Lankheet wrote: >> Hi there, >> >> I need to upgrade from RH7.3 either to RH9 or to Fedora. I base my decision >> on the presence of HPT370 RAID support. RH9 has a 3rd party driver. But i >> cannot find any information on Fedora RAID support, or any other hardware >> support. >> >> Could anyone please tell me where it is? > >Always the recommendation is to avoid HPT or Promise RAID for several >good reasons: > >1) It doesn't gain you much of any real performance. If you use RAID-0, >some synthetic benchmarks show better thruput, but real-world >Re: Where's the hardware compatibility list?Re: Where's the hardware Re: Where's >the hardware compatibility list? >compatibility list?applications are not much better. >2) It isn't real hardware RAID. It is poorly implemented software RAID >done by the drivers. Real software RAID by the Linux or Windows >operating system tends to have greater performance and reliability. >3) If you rely on the 3rd party binary-only drivers from Promise or HPT, >you are absolutely stuck in upgrading. To make matters worse sometimes >those binary-only drivers have been unstable, and the community or RH >will cannot and will not support you. You need to rely on the company's >support, and in most cases they ignore you. >4) It is *possible* to get it running using the /dev/ataraid devices for >the root filesystem, but only if you install to a single disk and copy >everything over manually and redo the GRUB or lilo boot loader. It >isn't worth the effort however because this makes it a pain in the butt >to upgrade, and you don't gain much of any real performance increase. > >Maybe 2 years ago I used to do #4, but it was too much of a pain so I >switched back to single disks. > >Warren ----------------------- Thanks for the warnings. If Abit didn't like the performance of the HPT370 chip, then why bother putting it in my KT7-RAID mainboard? Is it because of the term RAID sounding fast? It looks from the change logs that i will have to go beyond kernel 2.4.18 because of a lot of USB changes. So i will try to upgrade the latest kernel and load the HPT370 driver module. If that doesn't work, i'm going to say farewell to my semi-RAID. I still consider myself a newbie and don't know anything about software RAID. Jeroen.
