I have been looking for IDE Controllers with raid support for a few weeks. While everyone I talk to suggests 3Ware... Its not possible due to budgetary restrictions.

What I was wondering, is if anyone has had experience with a software raid card like Promise etc. with Mandriva. I dont want to have to mess with LinuxRaid or MDADM, I just want to setup the mirror from the card bios and go.

Thanks In Advance

I've used an IDE Promise raid card before (I forget what model) and it worked great. Wasn't that expensive either. Are you looking to do it with SCSI?

I rather go with Highpoint controllers. I had no problems with them. Promise controllers do have trouble with DMA with some hard drives. Forget the RAID feature (mostly software RAID) in controllers because Linux has software RAID. It is easier to deal with Linux software RAID instead of software RAID on the controller when using RAID 0 or RAID 1. You will have to use a utility named dmraid if you are using software RAID from the controller. The utility dmraid may not work with your kernel version. However 3ware is hardware RAID which is great when using RAID level 5.

That is what I was worried about. On my windows box, I have a software raid card with drive mirroring but last time i tried setting up in linux the same way it didnt work.

Any suggestions on howto setup a drive mirror from scratch using highpoint card? Im using mandriva 20006 and am not sure which modle is natively supported

Thanks

Highpoint, Promise, Silicon Image, SIS, VIA, INTEL, nVidia are software RAID controllers. I suggest installing Linux on a none RAID PATA hard drive then setup dmraid in the boot loader of your choice (LILO or GRUB). GRUB is userspace and easier to configure it with other Linux distributions. LILO gets your hands dirty if you are not careful. You will have to make a ramdisk or initrd file to include dmraid. Before you setup dmraid, I recommend backing up your data just in case you mess up.

Highpoint chip models 366 to 374 are supported, so all Highpoint controllers up to 1640 are supported by 2.4 kernel version and up. Also 1800 models is also supported I think.

Some Promise cards are complete hardware raid (I presume this is the case with some products from Highpoint, SiS, etc), most of the rest have raid accelloration that will be superior to software raid. From what I understand, this is not the case with their lower end "raid" cards and you get better performance completely bypassing it's functionality and using md. Personally, I would research your particular card more if you want to make sure you are getting your maximum possible performance.