On Sat, May 26, 2007 at 22:06:46 -0400, Claude Jones <claude_jones@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > systems, including the nVidia NForce series; what I'm gathering from all > this, is that the more expensive hardware systems do all the configuration in > their own hardware and present a RAID system to the OS, that just looks like > an ordinary drive - that's a question? That doesn't seem to make sense > either, to me, since I've messed around with some pretty expensive high end > servers - our old Compaq file server for example, which originally listed for > $30k, still used proprietary drivers to interact with the OS, and you had to > have them - there were Linux drivers available, and I was able to access that > machines RAID when it went down once, with a Linux rescue disk... You are always going to need some sort of driver for the controller (even if it doesn't support raid). Either one already in the distribution or one provided by the vendor. The difference is how much work is done by the raid controller card and how much by the CPU, and how caching is handled. The high end controllers still have many of the negatives of the low end controllers, but they have some significant positives that make them worth using. Battery backed cache is great for database systems where serial commits can be limited to one per rotation of a disk without it.
