nVidia or software RAID 5?

[Claude Jones]

On Sat May 26 2007, you wrote:
>   Claude Jones <claude_jones at levitjames.com> wrote:
> > We seem to be going around in circles. This whole thread started
> > with an assertion that nVidia RAID was just software RAID
> > dependent on Windows drivers and a BIOS patch. So, which is it,
> > is nVidia software or hardware based? Whether or no its cheap is
> > not the issue - it's whether its hardware or software, I think.
>
> Most cheap raid controllers such as come with motherboards are software
> raid in the sense that they reqiure significant CPU support. I don't
> know the status of your particular chipset.

I'm in 'learn' mode. Thanks for the input. I want to understand this all 
better so I'm doing a lot of research on this now. The nVidia nForce RAID 
system threw many curve balls at me today; it was losing RAID configurations, 
lost all the data and formatting on one mirror while I was working on 
another, and it all began with me pulling a drive on the OS mirror, 
yesterday, to test the system - the result was a blue screen, not exactly 
what a drive failure is supposed to do. Tech support at SuperMicro had me 
install some newer firmware to the Enterprise SATA server drives I'm using, 
but the tech notes didn't say anything about the specific issue I had, so I'm 
not sure I've really fixed things. I've got the server back up now, and no 
data was lost, but it took many hours and I still don't thoroughly understand 
how this is all supposed to work. I'm beginning to wonder if my use of the 
Qtparted Linux distro on my NTFS partition to shrink it, might have 
introduced some anomalies that are at the root of these problems...

-- 
Claude Jones
Brunswick, MD, USA