On Jan 4,  8:48am, Steven M. Klass wrote:

>          Just curious I noticed up on the deja boards that Linux apparently 
> supports the HotPoint 370 Chipset by patching the kernel 
> (http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/hedrick/ide-2.2.18/ide.2.2.18.1221.patch.gz) 
> to recognize the controller.  Now it appears that it DOES NOT support the 
> Raid functionality portion of the chipset per Andre Hedrick of 
> ide-kernel.org.  That's fine, but can it still do software raid?  Is this 
> an option?

The support in question just gives you IDE controller support for
the chipset, right?  If that's the case, then software RAID should still
work.

> Any Drawbacks or should I just get a REAL ide RAID 
> solution?

What do you consider a real IDE RAID solution?  Many of the so called
hardware IDE RAID solutions (e.g. Promise FastTrak) are actually
software RAID.  The Promise FastTrak66 is actually the same as the
Promise Ultra66 with the addition of one soldered jumper and different
Firmware.  (See Tom's Hardware for instructions on how to convert an
Ultra66 into a FastTrak66.)  Anyway, as I understand it the Promise
FastTrak boards come with drivers which actually end up doing software
RAID.  I'm not sure if Promise has Linux support yet or not.

The 3ware Escalade is a real RAID solution and it does cost more.
You should do a deja search on this product though.  I've read that
there are problems if you try to swap in a new disk which is of a
different size than the original.

FWIW, I've been using RAID-1 (provided by the Linux kernel) on one of
my machines for several months now (using a Promise Ultra66 controller
board) and I haven't had any problems.