What OSes can handle IDE hardware RAID?

[SUOrangeman]

With ATA-66 and ATA-100 RAID possibilities springing uo all over the place, I'm beginning to get the urge to try it out.

But, I could have sworn I read that not all OSes (Linux?) can handle IDE RAID (even via hardware?). Is this true? How about BeOS and others?

Thanks in advance.

-SUO

 

[evanichka]

Well, Promise is working on a driver for Linux for Fasttrak66. I have one and it works on Win95/98, DOS, and Win2k(Although you have to do a workaround... Promise released new drivers to fix that but never tried them yet). It wouldn't work with Linux yet so I had to use it with Linux under VMWare.

 

[SUOrangeman]

Hmmm, that would give me a reason to toy with VMWare ...

-SUO

 

[evanichka]

hehe... well VMWare is a pretty darn good program, except since it's emulation, sometimes, it can get rather slow.

 

[SUOrangeman]

OK, another question.

At what point would an ATA66 or ATA100 controller be saturated by data flying off the drives? I know that a single drive can burst at speeds that may approach 66MB/s (or 100MB/s for ATA100). What angle does RAID0 take in this situation? Can the controller only handle at most 33MB/s from each drive at once (or some combination that results in 66MB/s total)? Or, can the controller actually handle up to 66MB/s from each drive simultaneously? What about RAID0 configs with more than 2 drives?

OK, lemme go do some reseach on RAID.

-SUO

 

[Sebastian]

Linux has software IDE raid already. And it works fine.

 

[Soybomb]

My fastrack66 seems to be running a 2 disk array under linux just fine, I don't get 66mb/s transfer raters, but my drives dont support them, I just wanted the hardware raid card

 

[SUOrangeman]

If you guys have some links, I'd greatly appreciate it. I'm planning a system that I may build in the coming months. RAID could playa factor.

-SUO

 

[Soybomb]

I just combed around www.linuxnewbie.org, searching I think for "promise ide" I used partition magic to set up my images in partition pagic through windows, then I booted from the install cd and passed the memory location to the kernel in the form of "ide2=0xXXXX,0xXXXX,irq" as the article at linuxnewbie shows, then I just installed, seems to work for me!
Soy

 

[Sebastian]

There is a 2.2 kernel patch that'll allow the use of ATA 33 on promise controlers and others now. It's in the kernel ftp site. Although i forgotten the directory it's in. Sorry. But I am sure if you look it up on google it'll turn up.

 

[Quinto]

As someone previously stated, Linux supports both hardware and software RAID. It's not that tough to get going either. It seems to run flawlessly. I have it running on my comp now, RAID level 1 linking two 340MB hard drives (I know, 340MB drives, hardly worth it, just wanted to play with RAID). I have to say that the HOWTOs are not entirely easy to follow, but play with it a bit and it becomes apparent what they mean.

Good luck.

 

[SUOrangeman]

Thanks for the tips. I'm thinking I'll try this a few months down the line. I want to wait and see what AMD does with the 760MP chipset. Hopefully, there'll be a mobo that has ATA100 RAID on it or something.

-SUO