pci ide cards

[jakedakat]

I just had a quick question about setting up a Raid 0 array. I have the 2 drives I will be using, they are both 80 gigs. Next I need to get a pci ide card. Can I just run down to the local CompUsa or Microcenter and pickup a decent pci ide card? I don't have to worry about any sort of driver issues do I? I just wanna make sure before I go get one and run into all sort of problems. I am running Mandrake 9.1 by the way. Any help would be great. Thanks.

Rob

[DerekKraan]

You'll probably just have to compile support into your kernel. Chances are you'll have to do a tiny bit of research to find out what chipset your particular pci ide card supports. Also, you will probably get better performance from your motherboard's ide controllers, so use those for the 80gb drives, and use the pci ide card for your cd/dvd drives. BTW, I have exactly the same setup as you. If you want to make a root RAID array, don't forgot to make your partitions of type auto-detect raid or something like that. :P

[raz0rblade]

Make sure you get one that is supported.
I'm pretty sure you can use any Highpoint or Promise card.

Just stay away from Sil0680 ;)

[AnonyPuss]

I use the Promise cards, work great. Detected by Red Hat without additional drivers, never any problems. Should work as well with Mandrake. Can't say about other distros, though, although I would imagine that most do support them. I just wouldn't by a store brand(ie CompUSA), usually lesser quality and no Linux support.

[jakedakat]

Ok thanks, I just want sure if the cards required additional drivers. I try to stay away from Compusa brand parts as a rule a thumb :)

Rob

[jakedakat]

How much do you think it would hurt performance if one of the 80 gig drives was on the add on ide card? I am still gonna have a 30 gig drive with all the linux systmem files on it. The raid setup is only going to be for media files (mp3s and videos). Soon I am going to be upgrading the system and I was wondering would I be able to mount the raid setup under my new upgraded system when I get that up and running?

Rob

[AnonyPuss]

For example, you wouldn't want to buy an ATA100 card if your drive is an ATA133. Make sure that the card is at least the same speed as the drive. The cards are usually backward compatible, but not forward. As long as you do this, the performance will be just the same as if it were connected to the m/b IDE slot.

[Alex Cavnar, aka alc6379]

If you're going to do a RAID 0 setup (which I don't recommend anyways), then why not have both 80 GB drives per channel on the PCI IDE card? Like, on IDE1, one drive, and another on IDE2. When you've got one drive per channel, that helps with throughput. Also, I've used both the CompUSSR brand cards, and a Promise brand card-- if your kernel already supports IDE, then most likely your PCI card will be recognized without any extra configuration.

But, consider this: why run RAID0? If one of the drives goes bad, then you've lost 160GB of data. Why not just format each 80 GB drive, and store data on them? If you're running ATA 133 7200RPM drives, I don't think that the performance gains from running a striped RAID 0 setup will be that noticable...