>>> That brings up a last question on possiblity of either a >>> 3ware or acrea RAID 1 cards. I'm wondering how long I would >>> be able to order >>> a replacement RAID card from either of 3ware or areea. >>> Anyone know if 3ware or acrea stock identical replacement >>> cards for their SATA 4 port raid cards >>> for several years out? Do they stock past the three year >>> warranty period? >> >> ACTUALLY I totally forgot. I absoluteluy can not use >> software raid. Because I use Adobe products. Adobe products >> do not install >> well on software raid systems, and tend to crash on software >> raid beacuse of their activation process. If I go raid, I >> absolutely need a hardware raid >> which is entirely transparent to the operating system, at >> least as far as adobe products are concerned. > > What Adobe products do you use under Linux? I did not know > that Adobe offered products outside of Reader and Flash > for Linux. > > Besides, where did you read that Adobe products don't > work on RAID systems? > > The RAID part will be well hidden under the Logical Volume > Manager even if the first is true. > > RAID1 can speed up sequential read speed, as a well > designed RAID implementation can stripe the read requests > across both spindles (and dm-raid does that!). Ah I figured someone would ask that. I use pretty much all major adobe products, Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, just about the entire suite. I have two home workstation machines. One is Centos, and one is Windows (the one I use Adobe on). I'd prefer if possible to have the same type of RAID cards on both machines, because easier to manage and if I ever decide to sell or give away one machine, I can pull the raid card and use it as a backup. >From experience I have learned that Photoshop will not install on software raid on my W2K machine - I tried it two years ago, could not get it to install, and after a few days trying to get it to work, called Adobe tech support and at that time the tech support person told me that their products don't run on software raid because they don't want people having multiple copies of one license on a second drive (unless it's for their second copy allowance for a laptop or second machine owned by same person, and only one or the other - the laptop or second desktop are run at the same time - my second copy is on a laptop ). Also I may at some time migrate my adobe products to the Linux machine and run Adobe on WINE on the Linux box. Google just started working with the folks over @ WINE, and they want to make it so all adobe products run flawlessly on Linux - WINE, not just photoshop and illustrator. Today some adobe products run on wine well, some don't, in a few years they all will run well on a linux box using WINE. I'm not sure about running adobe using software raid on a linux box and WINE - never tried it, but going with hareware raid on the linux box eliminates another possible unknown. _________________________________________________________________ Connect and share in new ways with Windows Live. http://www.windowslive.com/share.html?ocid=TXT_TAGHM_Wave2_sharelife_012008