hi...i'm very new to raid but i'm linux savvy. i have like 0 raid experience but i'm thinking of getting this card:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16816132004
and have my 2-250gb ide drives in raid 1 (mirror) config.
i plan on having my audio and video files on this 250gb.
when i install linux, will it see 1 drive or 2 drives?
can someone explain how linux handles raid in general?

thanks,
bg742

If it's a hardware driven and linux supports that card (or they support linux) then you should see the final configuration. By final config I mean, if you configure the 2 drives as a mirror, or a stripe, you should see one drive.

If it's a driver based (in other words, software) and linux supports it, you would probably see both drives until you used their software driver to configure it. If it's software based, I think I would choose to use the linux native raid (mdadm) to manage it.

I'm sure someone else will have more info on it than I.

Hope this helps

The linux kernel supports the Silicon Image 0680 chipset (I think it has since ~2003?), but not the card's BIOS--so it won't work with any arrays you create in the BIOS setup utility.

In other words, you still will need to configure the drives attached to this card as a software RAID device in linux instead, as it only will see the separate drives, sort of like they were additional IDE ports on the motherboard.

The software RAID in linux should not be assumed to be of the same quality as that within windows--I've discovered that the mdadm tools work amazingly well on at least moderately-powered machines, and the resulting mirror (or even stripe set) is very portable--you can take the drives and place them into another machine altogether if necessary (just make sure you partition correctly )

If installing an OS from scratch, such as CentOS/RHEL, it's painless to set up the software RAID in the graphical installation.

Some basic info on linux software RAID: http://www.howtoforge.com/linux_software_raid

I used to be a 3Ware guy, but one of the biggest advantages of linux software RAID is that you don't have to keep recompiling binary blobs into your kernel with each kernel update etc. That, and the performance is about the same (and in some implementations better!) than the expensive RAID cards from 3Ware.

Hope this helps.