Where's the hardware compatibility list?

[Warren Togami]

On Mon, 2003-11-24 at 22:39, Jeroen Lankheet wrote:
> Hi there,
> 
> I need to upgrade from RH7.3 either to RH9 or to Fedora. I base my decision
> on the presence of HPT370 RAID support. RH9 has a 3rd party driver. But i
> cannot find any information on Fedora RAID support, or any other hardware
> support.
> 
> Could anyone please tell me where it is?

Always the recommendation is to avoid HPT or Promise RAID for several
good reasons:

1) It doesn't gain you much of any real performance.  If you use RAID-0,
some synthetic benchmarks show better thruput, but real-world
applications are not much better.
2) It isn't real hardware RAID.  It is poorly implemented software RAID
done by the drivers.  Real software RAID by the Linux or Windows
operating system tends to have greater performance and reliability.
3) If you rely on the 3rd party binary-only drivers from Promise or HPT,
you are absolutely stuck in upgrading.  To make matters worse sometimes
those binary-only drivers have been unstable, and the community or RH
will cannot and will not support you.  You need to rely on the company's
support, and in most cases they ignore you.
4) It is *possible* to get it running using the /dev/ataraid devices for
the root filesystem, but only if you install to a single disk and copy
everything over manually and redo the GRUB or lilo boot loader.  It
isn't worth the effort however because this makes it a pain in the butt
to upgrade, and you don't gain much of any real performance increase.

Maybe 2 years ago I used to do #4, but it was too much of a pain so I
switched back to single disks.

Warren