On Mar 22,  9:02am, Joseph Gledhill wrote:

> I am having trouble installing Mandrake 8.2 on a promise fastrack 100
> raid (for mirror).
[...]
> Also what is the performance hit with switching to software raid (for
> mirrors)?

It is my understanding that the Promise RAID controllers are not
really hardware RAID.  In fact, Tom's Hardware had an article quite
a while back on how to convert one of their Ultra cards to a Fastrak
by soldering a jumper wire to the card.

So, given that the Promise RAID technology amounts to little more than
software RAID, there's really no reason to prefer it over the software
RAID built into the Linux kernel.

FWIW, I've been using software RAID for quite a while now and have been
very happy with the results.  I use mirroring and have been saved on
more than one occassion from the consequences of a drive failure.

If you want true IDE hardware RAID on Linux, I think the only option is
to use the 3ware Escalade.  Or at least it was the last time I checked.
These cards are quite a bit more expensive though.

Kevin