nVidia or software RAID 5?

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Sat, May 26, 2007 at 02:22:21 -0400,
  Claude Jones <claude_jones at levitjames.com> wrote:
> On Thu May 24 2007, Gilboa Davara wrote:
> > .... Are you sure? AFAIK dmraid != softraid.
> > Either way, if your machine dies with the nVidia RAID, you have zero
> > chance of putting the drives in a new machine and getting them to work
> > out of the box.
> > With software RAID, it's just a matter of connecting the power cable...
> 
> Where are you guys getting this info. This is not to quarrel, but, my current 

The raid config on the disks is propietary. So you can't just move the disks to
another machine anwith different hardware and expect it to work. Software
raid is standard and can be used on any machine running a recent linux.
It can in theory be supported by other OS's, but I don't know if it is.

> experience directly contradicts, I think, several things being asserted in 
> this thread. I've got two SuperMicro SuperServers here running with Nvidia 
> Nforce chipsets and NVidia SATA RAID. Both have been configured with two 
> mirrors apiece. One mirror in each is dedicated to the OS, and the other to 
> data. Due to some recent issues, and to a decision to shrink the OS partition 
> on the system mirror, I ended up booting both of these machines into Linux 
> using hte gparted distro disk. There was no problem. According to the second 
> post in this thread -  "Every motherboard-based RAID solution is essentially 
> software RAID (provided by a windows driver) in combination with a BIOS patch 
> which allows the system to boot from the disk array." - that statement seems 
> to be in direct contradiction to my experience. I'm assuming that no windows 
> drivers are involved once I boot off the Linux gparted distro CD, or am I 
> missing something here? The boot-up did involve options to configure 

There are a number of dmraid driver kernel modules, so you may have been
using on of those.

> additional drivers for RAID, and I picked the Nvidia mirror drivers - but if 
> the Linux Nvidia drivers can 'see' the mirrors I created in Windows, that 
> would also seem to contradict some statements being made in this thread...no?

Well I think it has been mentioned previously in this thread that having raid
partitions visible to both linux and windows on the same machine (dual boot)
is one of the (few) reasons to use cheap hardware raid controllers.