A very nice alternative is the Araid 500. I've been using several of those on servers at my office, and they great. They are more expensive than the fastrack, but I haven't had any problems yet. It's acutally an enclosure that installs in two 5.25" bays. Nice thing about it is it supports hot-swapping and auto rebuild. It won't do striping, only mirroring. At 10:51 AM 3/22/02 -0700, you wrote: >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 >________________________________________________ >See http://PLUG.phoenix.az.us/navigator-mail.shtml if your mail doesn't post to the list quickly and you use Netscape to write mail. > >PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us >http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss ------------------------------------------------------------ Patrick Hustis TelTrax Corporation Vice President Information Systems phustis@teltrax.com 480-481-9292 ------------------------------------------------------------