On Sun, 07 Feb 2016 13:21:41 +0000, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

On 07/02/16 12:36, Andrew Gabriel wrote:
In article ,
The Natural Philosopher writes:
Linux will do some sort of RAID without need for a raid hardware
solution.

This chipset isn't hardware RAID - its BIOS has minimal support to
allow the PC BIOS to boot from a RAID set. Once the OS takes over from
the BIOS i/o functions, the OS needs a driver to perform the RAID
function. The RAID management data is all proprietary as far as I know
- at least,
they didn't publish it ~10 years ago when we were testing this chipset,
so if you use the BIOS RAID feature to boot from a RAID set, you have
to use their OS drivers.

But I question the value of RAID versus say a simple mirror the
important software on a nightly basis...

Depends what data availability you need. The cost of mirroring is worth
it for me - if a disk dies in the middle of my work, I don't have to
stop work and go and fix it.


that is fair enough, but then you have top replace it with a new one of
the same basic type.

I mirror partitions rather than disks - so any disk will do as long as it
is sufficiently big.