- Oct 10, 1999
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This just occurred to me and it's probably impossible or exceedingly difficult and not worth any research, or just would be stupid. Why not make a RAID setup at the factory? Connect two hard drives with some sort of frame that spaces them the way they'd fit in a standard 3.5inch bay (only one would need to be mounted with adapters for 5.25inch use). Put a little PCB behind them with a controller mounted going to each drive's IDE connector or even SATA connector, and another to connect to the main controller. The array would connect to the standard IDE controller and the OS would only ever see the single array, with the RAID chip actually handling the IDE transactions as if both drives were masters, but the main controller would only see a single master drive, or the chip could also simply set the two drives as master/slave for the main controller to handle and the RAID chip be bypassed.
The two drives would have to be connected so that they could be swapped if there was a failure of course. And maybe the RAID chip would end up basically bridging IDE to IDE and cause performance issues. But if that issue could be resolved, I'd think it'd make for cheaper RAID arrays if the manufacturers didn't attempt to overprice them. Smaller PCB, single package so users don't have to buy multiple parts and wonder about compatibility. Direct support from the maker for the entire setup instead of two companies blaming each other. No hassles of making the system boot to the array rather than the main IDE ports. No PCI bus limitations on modern chipsets.
The configuration program might have to be used on a boot floppy or something though, since the RAID BIOS couldn't be accessed.
The two drives would have to be connected so that they could be swapped if there was a failure of course. And maybe the RAID chip would end up basically bridging IDE to IDE and cause performance issues. But if that issue could be resolved, I'd think it'd make for cheaper RAID arrays if the manufacturers didn't attempt to overprice them. Smaller PCB, single package so users don't have to buy multiple parts and wonder about compatibility. Direct support from the maker for the entire setup instead of two companies blaming each other. No hassles of making the system boot to the array rather than the main IDE ports. No PCI bus limitations on modern chipsets.
The configuration program might have to be used on a boot floppy or something though, since the RAID BIOS couldn't be accessed.