[aldo_14]

This is just me fishing about for info related to work; albiet this isn't going to be my responsibility, I just said I'd sniff around for info......

Anyways, I'm wondering if anyone knows about setting up RAID servers running over Linux; I think we have a couple (of disks) in each of our current 2 servers, but the OS (I believe it's Gentoo - as I said, not really my area of responsibility) won't detect the disks as a RAID array and only runs them as bog-standard individual disks; so does anyone have advice on the best Unix based OS for running a (high bandwidth) server setup?

Also, on the same vein - we're planning on moving from our current, rather stunted, 2 shoddy server setup to a 8 servers each running 1 terabyte RAID arrays - does anyone know if it's possible to use RAID across all 8 servers in a highly parallelised way?  I don't know anything about RAID, really, so I'm all ears.

[Scuddie]

RAID is done thru the hardware layer, not the software layer.  If you simply have two disks without a RAID controller, or have a RAID controller without any configuration, then you just simply have two disks.

As for the idea of paralleled RAID, there is not a very likely method for doing so without spending huge bucks for special RAID controllers.  Sure you can have one RAID be on each machine, but what you're thinking of is probably best used for the Linux version of Active Directory indexing.  I don't know much of that nature, but I bet Maeg does.

[karajorma]

RAID is done thru the hardware layer, not the software layer.  If you simply have two disks without a RAID controller, or have a RAID controller without any configuration, then you just simply have two disks.

Are you telling me Windows can do software RAID (admittedly not brilliantly) but Linux can't?

[Scuddie]

There's of things Linux can't do (yet), and software RAID is one of them.  Probably because software RAID can't be done, period.  That abomination that is done by pseudo-volume is not RAID.

[Descenterace]

Your info is wrong. Linux can do software RAID. I've currently got systems running Debian and Gentoo and I know both provide software RAID capabilities, although I don't use them.

Software RAID is a bit of a joke though. If you can't afford to do it properly (with a hardware RAID controller) then don't do it at all. Expect to pay upwards of £150 for a decent SATA RAID 5 card.