Hardware or software RAID: which is it?

[GTengineer]

Simple question is the RAID on the Nvidia 600's chips (specifically 650i) software or hardware RAID?

 

[CGR]

All onboard raid controllers are software raid afaik. Hardware would be a controller card you add.

Also, the point of a hardware controller is to offload all processing from the computer to the card.

 

[GTengineer]

thanks CGR

I guess RAID is out of the question for me then because I cannot trade cpu speed for disk transfer speeds. In addition from what I have read only a couple of Linux distros support hardware raid.

 

[CrazyIrish]

technically a true software raid wouldn't need to be supported by the controller, only by the os. The onboard raid found on most all mobos these days is really sort of a hybrid of software/hardware raid. They lack the ram and xor engines of their big brothers, but manage morroring/striping independantly of the operating system.

 

[OkydOky]

Neither.

I like to Call it BIOS raid.. now the term is not too accurate... but I am not the only one that calls it that either...

When you use the Controllers that come integrated with a Motherboards, usually a small part of it is controlled by Hardware, such as setting up the Array with the Controller's Bios options... the rest is software, but done with specific drivers. A little is sometimes offloaded, depending on how much these onboard controllers can do.

Software RAID is purely software... you have two (or more) standard Hard drives... and a Program of some sorts takes care of all the writing.. to what drives.. ect.. your CPU is doing all those calculations, though the program. With software, it iis much easier to migrate the array to another mashine, since it is not hardware Dependant. All you need is the same program on the other machine.

In addition from what I have read only a couple of Linux distros support hardware raid.

The Good Controllers all have Linux support, if it does not, it honestly is not worth looking at.



What type of Raid array are you Looking at?

 

[GTengineer]

The Good Controllers all have Linux support, if it does not, it honestly is not worth looking at.

So with a well supported controller I could set it up in Ubuntu? I read here here that only Gentoo and Fedora supported hardware RAID. Although I suppose that site could be outdated.

What type of Raid array are you Looking at?

I posted a thread about this because I honestly don't know which RAID would be better for me.

Hey guys,

I am planning on getting 2 of these in about a month in addition to my current drive (which is an older 120Gig).
http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?t=512211

I have read the stickies on RAID and the definitions but I am still not sure what is best for me. I use my computer for work and it is very data sensitive, I cannot afford to lose my work. Therefore I suppose RAID0 is out of the question.

Is there any way I could make use of my old hard drive in conjunction with these 2 new seagates to achieve some kind of redundancy and still improve performance?

Another thing that is complicating my decision is that I am running Linux and I don't think it supports SATA RAID. Instead it requires the use of software RAID. Can someone tell me if this will have a great effect on performance as compared to hardware RAID? I am not sure it would even be worth it if it means the RAID array will use up my CPU and slow down my machine. CPU speeds are more important to me than hard drive access.

Also can someone share any link with benchmarks between different RAIDs?

Thanks and sorry for the long ramble

 

[ponkan pinoy]

Linux is linux. If something will work on one distro, it will work on any other -- all else being the same. The article isn't clear in that when it says debian and ubuntu don't support RAID, it means it can't INSTALL onto a RAID device out of the box (err, cd). So you need to boot the LiveCD, install dmraid, and manually install the system (i.e. no graphical installer). The instructions seem kosher, though I've never done RAID so I can't say for sure. dmraid is on the ubuntu repositories, so you should be able to get it.