On Mon, 2007-05-21 at 22:19 -0700, Dawning Sky wrote: > Hi, > > I'm building a new server with Asus M2N-SLI Deluxe motherboard, with > comes with the nVidia MediaShield Raid support. I'm wondering whether > I should use this function and setup my array in the BIOS, or I should > use the Linux software RAID and build the array directly from the > drives. Please advice. > > My setup: 1 300GB SATA drive as the system drive. 4 500GB SATA > drives to build a RAID 5. I also plan to further partition the RAID 5 > array, probably on top of LVM, to use as /home and some of /var. > > Thanks, > > DS > Give the fact the most (if not all) on-board SATA RAIDs are actually glorified BIOS based software RAID solutions I see little reason not to use software RAID. Unlike the nVidia RAID, Linux' software RAID: A. ... can use partition instead of full drives (In your case: 5x300GB in RAID5/md0 and 4x200GB in RAID/md1) B. ... can be moved to a different. Just connect the driver to a new machine, no matter which SATA controller is being used, and it'll work out of the box. C. ... scales much better, as the CPU power increases. - Gilboa
