nVidia or software RAID 5?

[Claude Jones]

On Sat May 26 2007, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
> On Sat, May 26, 2007 at 02:22:21 -0400,
>
>   Claude Jones <claude_jones at levitjames.com> wrote:
> > 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.
>

Well, what I'm saying is, I created the RAID mirrors with BIOS utility. Also 
required, were Windows Drivers that had to be loaded when I installed the OS. 
Then, when I booted from a Gparted Linux disk, I was able to successfully see 
those mirrors. I think I loaded the dmraid driver when I booted into Gparted; 
I'm saying 'I think' because some issues came up today when I was continuing 
to futz with this system, and I couldn't seem to get the same result again. 
Also, trying to expand the partition on the mirror resulted in loss of all 
data on the RAID, and a corrupted mirror. I made backups of each step along 
the way, so it was frustrating, but not disastrous. I did some research on 
dmraid today, and found some articles on a Gentoo help page that used the 
exact same negative language in describing the motherboard based RAID 
systems, including the nVidia NForce series; what I'm gathering from all 
this, is that the more expensive hardware systems do all the configuration in 
their own hardware and present a RAID system to the OS, that just looks like 
an ordinary drive - that's a question? That doesn't seem to make sense 
either, to me, since I've messed around with some pretty expensive high end 
servers - our old Compaq file server for example, which originally listed for 
$30k, still used proprietary drivers to interact with the OS, and you had to 
have them - there were Linux drivers available, and I was able to access that 
machines RAID when it went down once, with a Linux rescue disk...

> > experience directly contradicts, I think, several things being asserted
> > in this thread.....
>
> There are a number of dmraid driver kernel modules, so you may have been
> using on of those.
>

Yes, I think you are right - see above

> > 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.



-- 
Claude Jones
Brunswick, MD, USA