"Bryan J. Smith" b.j.smith@ieee.org wrote:
Lastly, I've also not seen FRAID-5 supported yet either.
FYI, from the kernel 2.4 iswraid README:
While they may or may not be distinguishing features, iswraid also: * supports RAID0 (striping) over n-disk volumes; * supports RAID1E (mirroring with striping) over n-disk volumes---this is equivalent to RAID1 for 2-disk volumes and to RAID10 for 4-disk volumes; * supports multiple volumes per array ("Matrix RAID");
Again, no newer FRAID-5 support. I'd actually like to see how well Windows FRAID-5 works against software RAID-5 in Linux.
* deals with missing disks in a reasonable manner;
This one is my favorite. ;->
In other words, the fact that you have no intelligence local to the hardware is a major issue, one that software can't solve. I.e., you can't just hot-swap FRAID hardware, let alone if a device goes down, the kernel might panic.
Why? Because the "raw" individual drives are still what the kernel communicates with.
* can operate with volumes in degraded mode (unless instructed not to); * implements disk error thresholds; * tries to satisfy failed RAID1E reads using each failed disk's mirror.
Again, more subjective differences that could be an issue between the FRAID 16-bit BIOS and the OS -- especially when dual-booting.