Thank you Matthias & Alexander.
I find it difficult to trust "software" RAID from past experience on other O/S platforms, and from the purely logical perspective. It may be better than the Promise junk, but not as good as "real" RAID.
I think you are confusing the Promise Fasttrak Raid controller with a hardware raid controller. It does all raid in software. All raid occurs in the driver with exception of minimal boot support in the bios. The only difference between using the promise driver, and the linux md driver is the promise driver sucks.
A true hardware based array only offers the O/S its controlled interface to
the array. i.e. One gadget that requires a driver to communicate requests
thru, but all the RAID logic happens via silicon that is not corruptible
from the O/S. There is no access to the arrays hardware parts like hde and
hdf as in my example. Software RAID is corruptible by definition.
To those users of other on mobo RAID chip sets - Does the O/S see the underlying hdX devices that the array is utilizing? I'm hoping that a real RAID chipset mobo exists so I don't have to fork over lots of $$$ for a RAIDCORE, 3WARE, or ADAPTEC controller.
You are going have shell out a fair bit for a hardware raid controller.
-- Unless you can't avoid it never put a serial number on any of your systems!! (The Numberless Rule of Hardware Acquisition) Sam Flory <sflory@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
