[Techtalk] Simply Hardware 3B

[Sophie]

On Mon, Aug/19/02 10:23:19PM -0400, Andrew wrote:
> Jenn, Sophie & those good people interested,
> 
> >remove the raid card until you're sure everything else is ok - right 
> >now, it's only confusing things.
> 
> 	Pulled the PCI raid card, Machine booted off the CD instantly. Yeah!

Right. I thought it might :)


> 	Now what?     Here is were IChat is a good thing.

Feel free to find me on irc - #linuxchix (I believe there are details on the linuxchix website) or efnet. This discussion is possibly getting a little long for techtalk; I wouldnt like to bore people :)


> 	I have another HD floating around, remember there are 4 (60gb 
> ea) of them now disconnected in the machine. Where to from here?? 

Now we find out why the presence of the raid controller is interupting the boot process. I'm not entirley sure why this is happening, to be honest. I'll have a think...


> Should I consider putting in the (extra) 15gb drive on the now vacant 
> seconday motherboard slot?
>       It was my intention to use the raid as boot. should I?

Well, that depends how you want to use the raid. If you want it for speed, then boot off the raid controller. If you want it for size, then it will actually be slightly faster to use the spare drive off the motherboard's controller (assuming the drives are similar speeds etc). Your call here - speed or size.

Personally, I use the ata raid for data (/home) and boot from another disk (which happens to be scsi, albeit awaiting a new scsi controller).


> 
> >It's a Silicon Image 0680 controller,
> 	Yes how did you know????

You gave the output from the Medley bios.


> 	OK I intend to use the PCI card to stripe, someone suggested 
> a software raid was better, I have read similiar things, don't have 
> the experience to even dicuss it. SO I will follow you (Sophie) and 
> use the striped hardware raid when and if this show gets on the road.

Definatley hardware. The idea here is that it's faster for the raid controller to do the controlling, in much the same was as 3d graphics cards have hardware acceleration for (guess what) 3d graphics. You *could* do 3d graphics in software, but it's slow. The same for raid - you *could* do software raid, if you dont have a hardware controller for example, but it's slower.

On the other hand, software is easier :)

- sophie