I have purchased mandrake 10.1 and i am having some problems configuring my hard drives in a raid1 setup. I currently have a 74gb SATA set up. I want to add 2 250 with a raid1 configuration, i entered disk drake, and set up the raid, and i also configured it in the bios. When in disk drake, i was given the choice to create raid0, raid1... etc. This made me wonder, if it gives me these options, then it must be a software raid rather that a bios level hardware raid.
so 1st, is it a software raid???
2nd, is there any aparent difference between bios (hardware) level and software level raids.
and 3rd, is there anyway to make it a bios (hardware) level raid.

*note* drives are sata drives.

Ok I have a couple questions.

Are you using a SATA controller card?
Are you using onboard SATA?

If you are using a decent controller card use hardware raid.
decent = has chip on card to preform operations.

If you are using onboard sata controller. I believe it is just a non-standard software raid. It still uses you cpu to execute operations.

Software raid. I would use your mandrake software raid over onboard. They are almost the same, and with software raid I think switching drives between systems is easier.

I am no expert. All I am doing is passing on advice handed to me by others. I hope this helps.

I am not sure I got my point acrossed.

Controller card with cpu chip is the only real hardware raid setup I know of. Most of these cards are really expensive. More than a reasonably priced p4.

If you are using the the onboard (motherboard) setup it is very similar to software in that it still uses your cpu to execute Raid 1.

Software Raid is fine. The differences between hardware raid and software raid are minimal. AFAIK

So if you don't have contoller card use software raid via Mandrake. ( My .02)

Sorry for the long message.

Blair