My motherboard has a Promise 378 RAID controller and I recently set it up with 2 Maxtor 80gb drives (1xSATA/1xIDE) in a RAID 0 configuration. Then i installed windows and that seems to be working fine (and fast!), however for obvious reasons I want to be running linux on my RAID array aswell.

Ive done some poking around online and found lots of howto's to install linux on software RAID but all require destruction of the current array, then recreating it with linux tools etc. Also GRUB seems to not recognize arrays properly so it looks like i might need a 3rd drive for MBR

Does anyone out there feel my pain? perhaps someone has even solved this problem recently and wants to share their wisdom??

Thanks,
James

What OS are you using? State the exact version.

Just to give you an idea, you have the TX4000 promise card equivalent. Goto promise's site, and match up the driver with the OS- if possible. If not.. well, it's not fun.

Yeah, I feel it. Especially after trashing my WinXP setup. Did you ever figure out how to get Fedora running on RAID 0? I have two 400GB SATA drives and I am just ticked off that I can't run Linux on them. I wish I had looked into this before I bought the drives. Now I wish I stuck with my SCSI drives. Only problem is that 800GB of 10K SCSI would have cost me a fortune.

--zbert

There is a solution. Get this card if you are on a budget:

http://www.monarchcomputer.com/Merch...ricewatch&NR=1

Get this one if you want to have the bestestest:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...ntroller+Cards

They are $120 and $330, respectively and will work natively on any linux os, among others. It's true hardware RAID. Good luck.

Thanks Thoreau. After searching and reading many posts, I had come to the conclusion that 3ware was the way to go. I just wasn't sure which was the best option for me. I'm kind of leaning toward the 9550SX-4LP as I am sure I will get better performance and have the option to add 2 more drives.

Thanks for the recommendation. Your post was the one that convinced me that this is the way to go.

Edit: Oops! just saw that it had a PCI-X interface. Any recommendations for plain ole PCI? I would imagine that the 9500S-4LP would be a good alternative for me.

--zbert

I have the 9500S-4LP on this machine I'm typing on. It does everything the PCI-X one does that's of any use. Even allows you to migrate drives sizes as time goes by. Very nice when you have 1 Terabyte of data, and want to magically move to 2 Terabyte's without formatting.