Current best recommendation for Athlon 64 motherboard?

[Ken Snider]

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Eugen Leitl wrote:

| They will perform very poorly in comparison to native /dev/md0, and you'll
| have to buy a couple, to have one as spare. No such issues with soft RAID,
| which can be read with any vanilla motherboard.
|
| Sure, an appliance with acoustic alarm, hotplug and automatic rebuild saves
| some major hassles.

Some other considerations.

A drive blowing on a hardware RAID rarely locks up the RAID controller - the
same can not be said of most onboard ATA controllers, and some SCSI
controllers as well.

RAID controllers that have battery-backed-up NVRAM can complete writes much
more reliably in failure scenarios - and ensure that even in a power-loss
situation, or OS lockup, data will get flushed to disk, though this may or
may not matter to you given your usage and filesystem.

lastly, many RAID controllers offer far more ports than you could hope to
get on a mainboard - the 3ware 8 and 12 drive controllers actually have 8 or
12 on-board channels, I've never seen a motherboard with more than 5
channels (you wouldn't want to use master/slave configurations on these
controllers, in fact you don't even have that option with the 3ware cards).

I have software RAID deployed on over 50 boxes here, but on the ones I
*really* care about, I use, at minimum, hardware mirroring, to offload the
rebuild process in the case of a bad disk, as well as to reduce the risk
that a bad disk may hose the underlying IDE driver.

- --
Ken Snider
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