Hardware Raid (linux)

[Shelnutt2]

Alright, I've been using my single Hatachi Deskstar 250 gig for a while now. I'm ready for some faster hdd action. I'm not interested in ssd's yet the $/gb isn't good enough yet. I have seen the threads recommending the WD black 640GB drive, so I'm not asking about the hdd.

Since I dualboot both windows and linux, I figured I need to look into actual hardware raid and not fake raid. That way thinks can go easier between partitions? Does anyone have experience with dual booting using hardware raid?

What raid card is good? Should I look for PCI-E or PCI? Right now I have a gigabyte P35-DS3R, so only a PCI or PCI-E 1x card will work. The bandwith of a PCI slot is 266 MB/s right? The 1,000 MB/s of a PCI-e 1x slot is more than enough right? Will the drives saturate the bandwidth? I'm thinking of doing a raid 1 + 0 mixture. But for linux having separate /swap /boot /home and / partitions, plus a windows and a storage partitions. I'm looking at 6-7 total partitions. How easy is this to accomplish?

[cyberfish]

No need to put a swap partition on RAID. Swap partitions are automatically raided. Just make 2 swap partitions on 2 different drives.

Linux software RAID is really good, but I don't think Windows supports booting from one. So yes, you probably need a hardware RAID (but doesn't your motherboard have one builtin?)

Fake RAID is fine, they appear as hardware RAIDs and just use the CPU for computations. Just not pure software RAID (like Linux's mdadm or Windows's dynamic disk).

[jason4207]

I would just run MATRIX RAID off your board. The DS3R supports it. I would assume that LINUX has drivers for it.

How many HDDs are you planning on putting together?

[Shelnutt2]

I'm looking at starting with 2, and then adding 2 more latter. So 2 drives in raid 0 and then I'll add in two more drives for 0+1 raid.

My main concern with matrix raid would be, can linux see the windows partitions or vice versa. My storage partition I need both OS's to see.

[cyberfish]

I have never used hardware (or fake) RAID, but chances are, Intel RAID will be supported by both OSes better than anything else, since it's the most widely used.