Current best recommendation for Athlon 64 motherboard?

[Bryan J. Smith]

Timothy LeBlanc wrote:
> The only issue I ran into was the board has built in RAID and I wanted
> to have a mirrored drive set. FC3 see's the drives fine but not as a
> mirrored set as set up in the BIOS.

That's because it is what I call "FRAID" (Fake/Free RAID).
There is *0* hardware, it is a standard ATA controller with a trick 
BIOS.
Once the OS boots, it needs a driver with all the *software* RAID logic.
Because this logic contains all the RAID IP (typically licensed), there 
will *never* be a GPL driver.
If you're lucky, you can find a binary-only driver for a specific 
kernel.

Now there is a generic GPL RAID logic called "ataraid" and various FRAID 
interface modules (hptraid, pdcraid and silraid) but they typically 
don't work - and I've seen people trash their boot.
Again, the problem stems from the fact that these FRAID approaches have 
0 hardware - they are 100 percent software other then the boot-time 
16-bit Int13h disk services.

>  I have looked around for drivers
> for my Raid controller but have not found any yet. I can always use
> the software RAID in FC3 to create my mirror set but for now I'm happy 
> and will continue to look for a driver.

LVM/MD in Linux will always *outperform* a FRAID driver.
Same deal with LDM in NT5 (200x/XP).

For more on LVM v. FRAID v. microcontroller v. ASIC-driven RAID, see my 
2004 April Sys Admin article.
Unfortunately it is not freely available on-line, but FYI if you get Sys 
Admin - they include a CD with all past articles if you have a 
subscription.
--
Bryan J. Smith   mailto:b.j.smith at ieee.org
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