Yuyo

The 3ware support is built into the standard kernel. Therefore, it is available irrespective of what distro you choose to use. Hardware Raid cards have their own logic chips to do the calculations. For instance, when you are doing XOR parity calculations in RAID 5, this matters. You can also move hds between systems when using hardware raid, which you may or may not be able to do in software raid, depending on how you set it up. Hardware Raid also includes some very nice monitoring utilities, such as the ability to be emailed if one of the hard drives goes down, automatic rebuilds, etc. Look into it.

I suppose you are talking IDE Raid not SCSI. 3ware support is built into the kernel. When you are loading Mandrake, simply click yes when asked if you have additional SCSI controllers, that's how the OS sees 3ware cards, and click on the driver for the 3ware card. Prior to this, you should have created your RAID array in the 3ware bios, of course. Best of luck. Of course, if you are so inclined you can go for Software raid, but I much prefer a hardware raid if it is at all possible.

Congress will not interfere in any way with the desires of Microsoft. I remind you it was the present administration, which now controls both houses, that allowed Microsoft to walk away without bearing any form of serious punishment. The settlement is a joke. Against this backdrop, I am not very reassured that Congress will stand in the way of Intel et al as they shove Palladium/TCPA down our throats. When they do, kiss Linux goodbye. If you think this is a hasty conclusion, do a quick google and read Prof. Anderson's TCPA FAQs.

Yeap, IBM has been doing it for quite some time.

Wow, calm down! Breath a little. Ok, now. I have never used Lindows. Debian, Mandrake and Red Hat are the only distros that I have tried and know. What is cool about the above pc? It gets around the "legal" issues of playing dvds by having the playaback code in eprom that boots instantly. This is a first in the Linux world. If I were giving my father a computer, this would be great. Look you don't have to wait for it to boot to play music or DVDs. Since the DVD playback, as I understand is in the eprom, you should be able to replace Lindows with whatever distribution tickles your fancy and retain playback functionality. My old grandpa once told me to not jump to conclusions easily. Good advice that was. I'll pass it on to you for free, so you can share it with others. You may even modify it, but if you improve on it, be sure to let those you care about know. Take care

A Linux media PC. Yes! http://info.lindows.com/lmc/

A number of people here do not recognize the seriousness and the implications of TCPA/Palladium. Both Intel and AMD have committed to including the Fritz chip in the main processor. Please do read abou this. I have discussed it at length in the thread below and I suggest, humbly, that you give it a read. You'll be glad you did. http://forums.storagereview.net/viewtopic....&highlight=rape

Thanks for replying. Well, my promise controller was included with the drives themselves, so I assume WD would have taken the time to make sure that it works as it is included with their drives. .I upgraded the firmware for the controller and both RedHat and Windows NT 4.0 server can use it without issues. Mandrake 8.2 sees both drives and allows you to create a Raid Mirror, but doesn't allow you to assign a partition mout point to them, such as /home or /var. This makes Mandrake 8.2, the only version which sees the two drives attached to the controller, useless for the task at hand: a home file server. The more I use RedHat, the more I realize that it is harder to get it to do some things than Mandrake, but what it does do, it does it very well I have helped many on the road to Linux before and now I find myself puzzled by a messed-up catch 22. Red Hat 8.0 installs beautifully, looks great and creates a working RAID 1 array, but refuses to serve the files over Samba. If there is something silly that I am doing or failing to do, please enlighten me. The samba clients have been added to the Redhat machine samba groups with smbpasswd –a username. Still no go. Very weird indeed. Since file sharing works flawlessly between my Mandrake 9.0 Laptop and my Win2K desktop at work, I decided to copy over my working smb.conf from my laptop installation of Mandrake 9.0 and made changes to it, such as the computer name and workgroup name, etc. The Home user directories NOW work some of the time, but you can only log if the username you have matches the username of the home directory you are trying to access, i.e., you can’t map drives to a share by providing a different user name in W2K. On a side note, I have also noted that RedHat 8.0 is a lot slower than both Mandrake 8.2 and Windows N.T 4.0 on the machine I am using, which I never expected it. All of it, very strange. In Summary, *Mandrake detects drives on 8.2 but not on 9.0. *Mandrake 8.2 creates a useless Raid Array, since it doesn’t allow you to designate mount points. *Red Hat installs perfectly, but makes sharing files, at least so far, next to impossible. *NT works out of the box, even the software Raid. This is pretty sad, as NT 4.0 is now more than 5 years old. I would rather not use it, but if there is no way around this, then I can’t spend more time on something that should be very trivial. Of course, I could buy a 3ware card, but I don’t have the money to do so now and there is no absolute guarantee that this would solve the problem. I really like Mandrake's configuration tools, but it seems that it will either have to be Win NT for now or Red Hat, if I can get it to share files.

In case somebody can clarify the mistery, I went and tried Mandrake 8.2 and it sees both drives attached to the Promise controller and it is able to create the Raid Arrays from them. This really makes no sense. How can something work on Mandrake 8.2 and not do so on Mandrake 9.0? I wish I could fix this as it will be double work to update the much older 8.2? Somebody has to have a good workaround for this. If you can please help.

I am about to build a personal file and web server. The setup is as follows: Gateway G6-450 Pentium II-450 Mghz 384-MGB of RAM 3COM-595TX Card Cheap DVD-Drive Quantum 13GB HD 2 WD 200 GB JB in Software Raid 1 Promise TX2 Ultra 100 PCI Card (came with the drives) Mandrake Linux 9.0 Here's my problem. When I get to the partitioning tool of the installation, the installer only sees one of the two WD drives attached to the Promise controler. If anyone can shed light on why this might be happening, I'd be very appreciative. Mandrake has a very tuned Apache with all kinds of extensions pre-compiled, so if possible, I would much prefer to use Mandrake. This is not a hardware issue as Red Hat 8.0 sees both drives and installs allowing me to setup a Raid 1 between the 2 WD hard drives. I have used the Raid 1 to place my /home and /var directories there. I really would prefer to use Mandrake as that what I have always used for the past 3 years and know best, so lend a hand if you can. Thank you, Yuyo

I also would like to extend a warm thank you to Stallman for his unrelenting fight for freedom. His vision and his passion are an inspiration to me.

Try the 3ware controllers. The drives are included in the stock kernel and they work very well. I specifically recommend the 3-ware 7450 or 7850. Hypermicro sells them in the US at a decent price.