At 11:43 PM 01/31/2000 , Dave Gillett wrote:
>On 31 Jan 00, at 15:15, Roberto Safora wrote:
>
> > Any way that I can mirror or set any raid level using IDE disks?
>
>   There are a few products which claim to allow RAID-like
>arrangements with IDE drives.  They're not common or standard.
>
> > Reading a manual of an intel gx motherboard, they talk about software or
> > hardware raid implementation.
> > Woul some one give me a brief axplanation of each one?
>
>   In a hardware RAID configuration, a controller card manages the
>physical drives (it will come with configuration software) and the
>"drives" that the OS sees are RAID volumes managed by the controller.
>
>   In a software RAID configuration, the OS sees the physical drives
>and links them together into sets.  Not all OSes can do this --
>amongst Windows, this is unique to NT (and presumably also Win2K).
>
>   There are two key reasons to prefer a hardware implementation,
>despite the cost of the controller ($300 and up):
>
>1.  RAID management can steal CPU time away from your applications.
>
>2.  If the OS is managing the RAID array, you can't boot from the
>array -- you need a non-array boot volume in the software-only case.


As an adjunct to David's comments, you might want to read the hardware
review on our web site of Arco's IDE raid controller, (written by Drew Dunn),
from Decemeber 1999, in the Articles section:
     http://nospin.com/pc/fall1999/fall99_0001.html

Drew found this card to be a great Raid1 solution with no performance hit
on the PC.

     Bob Wright
The NOSPIN Group

                         PCBUILD's List Owner's:
                      Bob Wright<[log in to unmask]>
                       Drew Dunn<[log in to unmask]>