NATA update

Thomas E. Spanjaard tgen at netphreax.net
Wed Dec 6 05:24:01 PST 2006


Joerg Sonnenberger wrote:
The "onboard" RAID controllers are more or less a marketing gag. Almost
all the functionality still has to be implemented in the drivers, they
don't offer the performance of real RAID controllers nor the ability to
use e.g. battery buffered write caches. In short, they don't offer over
ccd or vinum.
The only thing that sets them apart from normal ATA controllers is their 
built-in RAID BIOS which lets the BIOS access the RAID volume as a 
single disk. In theory, if you used only the BIOS calls, you would be 
presented only with the logical disk, and the BIOS driver in the EEPROM 
on the card would do the work (well, the host CPU would, but the code is 
stored in the EEPROM). Performance would suck though, even when using 
BIOS DMA. In any case, if you really want the R in RAID, get a real 
hardware RAID controller.

Cheers,
--
        Thomas E. Spanjaard
        tgen at netphreax.net
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