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.

David G

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