Re: [gentoo-user] Is an Intel motherboard RAID better or worse than software RAID?

[Wolfgang Liebich]

Hi,

Alan McKinnon schrieb:
> On Wednesday 15 October 2008 15:13:45 Pintér Tibor wrote:
>
>>> I'm in the process of setting up a new private computer. I've bought one
>>> with two drives b/c I wanted to setup a RAID system - RAID1 for
>>> important partitions, RAID0 for scratch files maybe.
>>> Additionally I would like to use LVM2 --- on my work PC I've grown to
>>> like the flexibility of that.
>>> The Intel DQ35JO motherboard now supports some kind of mobo based RAID.
>>> Is it better to use this HW raid, or to ignore that and use only the
>>> linux kernel's software RAID.
>>>
>> thats not hardware raid, it never was, it never will be.
>>
>
> Rule of thumb:
>
> For any machine you buy to use at home, dump the on-board RAID and use Linux
> software raid instead.
>
> Reason: kernel raid works, that on-board crap doesn't
> Other reason: real hardware raid costs many times more than that entire
> computer you bought for home use
>
>
OK - nearly everyone here (and at work, too) told me to forget the
onboard fake raid controller. So this is what I will do :-)
The RAID-Howto as well as the LVM howto are however woefully out of
date. I will try to work with the linux-raid website's info.

Basically I plan to do:
- Put the boot partition on a RAID1
- Put the root partition on another RAID1 (I thought about putting the
root filesystem into my LVM setup, too -- it is REALLY annoying if the
root partition get's to small),
  but it seems safer to let root be an own partition. Or are there any
different opinions here? I'm very interested in hearing experiences...
- Build a RAID1 partition for the rest of the system (will be a LVM2
container)
- Build a last RAID0 partition for scratch data (/tmp, /var/tmp,
/usr/portage, scratch data).

Any comments? Obviously insane? :-) Don't think so.
- Wolfgang