Re: [gentoo-user] Intel SRT + SSD + SATA

[J. Roeleveld]

On Wed, June 26, 2013 00:13, William Kenworthy wrote:
> On 26/06/13 04:59, Alan McKinnon wrote:
>> On 25/06/2013 21:10, Mick wrote:
>>> Hi All,
>>>
>>> I am considering my options for a new rig destined to last a few years
>>> and one
>>> of the Dell machines on offer has this Intel SRT fake-raid feature,
>>> which
>>> after some cursory googling, I am not entirely sure will work with
>>> Linux.
>>
>
> It will probably work quite well ... easy to set up, use and is reliable
> ... until the motherboard fails and you find that ALL your data is now
> inaccessible until you buy a compatible motherboard ... which may not
> exist! - been there, done that, never again :)  From memory there was no
> linux driver needed (it was all done in the chipset).

My experience with fake-raid was that a Linux-driver was needed. Maybe you
had it in the kernel?

> Use soft raid, its performance is at least as good (there was a report
> saying it was usually better, even against some lower end dedicated raid
> cards which were resource constrained), and its portable.

Linux softraid outperforms any fakeraid card. The reason for this is simple:
The drivers for softraid and the SATA/SAS/SCSI chipsets are still being
improved by the kernel developers.

The drivers for fakeraid are written on a friday afternoon and when they
reach the stage of "it works", development stops.

I've done some performance tests with fakeraid vs. linux softraid in the
past. The difference in speed was shocking.

> Thats not to say "dont use the box" - the disk interfaces are usually
> very good performers in standard mode so just dont use the raid mode.

Set it to "AHCI" mode for better performance on most new mainboards.

--
Joost