Abit AV8 raid

flysoul · n00b Joined: 18 Feb 2004 Posts: 10

I want to buy an Abit AV8 motherboard, but I'd like to know if it's raid controller work on linux. Anyone knows?

EvilMonkey · n00b Joined: 23 Jul 2004 Posts: 32

Well the short answer is yes, it will work. However, it is not a good idea, it is basically useless and will bog down your system. The reason is that it is a software raid, that means that the CPU has to deal with working the details of how the raid will work. The best raid is pure hardware raid, requireing a pci card costing between $300-$1000. The reason they are expensive is because they contain their own special CPU and cache set, which shifts the load from the CPU to that card, leaving the CUP free for other things. Even $80 dollar cards will not hack it. I got an $80 promise card a few months ago from newegg. I install gentoo on it with "hardware" raid that the card had, but when the promise card failed to work with gentoo and I removed the card, I noticed that on the drives raid-0 that I had setup, only wrote to one drive, leaving the other drive untouched, this is probably because gentoo didn't like the card, but still, the card should have done what it was supposed to, but failed. Honestly, don't get a raid card unless you have some kind of server whose files you just can't ever lose, if it is for gaming, it's just not worth it, unless you have 300 bucks to burn.

flysoul · n00b Joined: 18 Feb 2004 Posts: 10

as the motherboard said it had supoort for raid, i thought it was a hardware raid... isn't it implemente by the via chipset?

i don't want to use the linux software raid because i'd like to also put windows on this disk... is there any software raid solution that can work with both?

bendy · Posted: Sun Jan 16, 2005 9:04 pm Post subject:

The via raid controller is basically a software solution with a little bit of hardware assistance to help the windows driver. With a hardware raid controller, the OS (whether windows or linux) would just see one hard drive as the controller does all the work and the setup is achieved through the controller's own bios.

I'm not sure I agree with EvilMonkey though. The cpu overhead of software raid is not that great, but you can get a significant increase in throughput (or redundancy, depending on your setup). Whether this actually is of benefit to you depends on what you doing on your machine.

I have an abit av8, and I'm using software raid under linux. I see no reason why you couldn't run raid under both windows and linux on your machine if you set up your partitions correctly.

Personally, I have an ide hard drive which has win2k and my linux boot partition on it, and then a software raid setup for my linux root and home partitions.

flysoul · n00b Joined: 18 Feb 2004 Posts: 10

bendy · Posted: Mon Jan 17, 2005 8:46 pm Post subject:

I have 2 disks striped in a raid 0 array using linux kernel software raid. AFAIK to do this you need your /boot partition containing the kernel NOT to be on the raid 0 array, hence my /boot is on the ide drive. However you could have a small /boot partition on one of your sata drives and stripe the rest.

You start by partitioning the raid drives individually into matching pairs of the same size partitions. You could have as many "pairs" as you like, and hence have both windows and linux on the same machine.

I can't comment on how raid 0 works with windows, but the manual that came with the motherboard had some instructions and a driver disk that you use early in the windows install process.

Try the abit web site to see if they have any instructions online.