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Top Forums UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers RAID software vs hardware RAID Post 302438726 by Corona688 on Tuesday 20th of July 2010 02:09:23 PM
Old 07-20-2010
Hardware RAID is handled by a specialized RAID controller card which does its own processing to make many devices act like one. This card is either configured through BIOS extensions(you may get an extra 'hit ESC to setup' message on boot) or through proprietary utilities. Once configured, the separate drives act like one device to the OS that you could do anything to you'd do with a normal drive, including boot from.

Software RAID on the other hand takes several devices already apparent to the OS and just accesses them through special routines, so they're treated as one device. The computer has to do all its own processing, so there may be some performance cost there. It may not be able to combine reads the way a hardware RAID could, i.e. you might not get double-speed reading from a mirrored array, but implementations vary. Because the drives still present themselves as many seperate drives to the kernel, it's harder to boot properly from a software RAID. I won't say impossible, but the kernel may need special configuration to properly autodetect and mount the array.
 

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ASR(4)							   BSD Kernel Interfaces Manual 						    ASR(4)

NAME
asr -- driver for Adaptec I2O based SCSI/ATA host bus adapters SYNOPSIS
device asr DESCRIPTION
The Adaptec asr driver provides access to disks and disk arrays controlled by I2O based host bus adapters and SmartRAID SCSI RAID adapters through the standard SCSI disk da(4) interface. The supported adapters provide 64 bit PCI, Compact PCI, Zero Channel PCI, and up to four channels of Ultra2, Ultra 160, or Ultra320 SCSI, or two channels of 1GB Fibre. All support RAID-0, RAID-1, RAID-10, RAID-5 and RAID-50 arrays. All SCSI target types are supported. For the ATA based controllers, one IDE drive per channel is supported. Hot-swapping of IDE drives is not supported at this time. All host bus adapters must be configured before they can be used with any operating system. Please contact Adaptec directly to obtain the latest information on configuration utilities for the adapters. Currently there are both a Motif based GUI configuration utility and a CLI based configuration utility available from the Adaptec Web site. The cards and arrays can also be configured via the BIOS based configura- tion tool (SMOR). HARDWARE
The adapters currently supported by the asr driver include the following: o Adaptec Zero-Channel SCSI RAID 2000S, 2005S, 2010S, 2015S o Adaptec SCSI RAID 2100S, 2110S o Adaptec ATA-100 RAID 2400A o Adaptec SCSI RAID 3200S, 3210S o Adaptec SCSI RAID 3400S, 3410S o Adaptec SmartRAID PM1554 o Adaptec SmartRAID PM1564 o Adaptec SmartRAID PM2554 o Adaptec SmartRAID PM2564 o Adaptec SmartRAID PM2664 o Adaptec SmartRAID PM2754 o Adaptec SmartRAID PM2865 o Adaptec SmartRAID PM3754 o Adaptec SmartRAID PM3755U2B / SmartRAID V Millennium o Adaptec SmartRAID PM3757 o DEC KZPCC-AC (LVD 1-ch, 4MB or 16MB cache), DEC KZPCC-CE (LVD 3-ch, 64MB cache), DEC KZPCC-XC (LVD 1-ch, 16MB cache), DEC KZPCC-XE (LVD 3-ch, 64MB cache) -- rebadged SmartRAID V Millennium FILES
/dev/asr* Adaptec SCSI RAID control nodes NOTES
The ATA based controllers present their devices as SCSI-like devices via CAM. For IDE drives attached to these cards, a subset of standard SCSI commands and mode pages are understood via translation performed in the card's firmware. SEE ALSO
da(4) HISTORY
The asr (Adaptec SCSI RAID) driver first appeared as the dpti2o driver under BSDi BSD/OS 3.2, then under FreeBSD 2.2.8 and was ported over to the CAM layer represented in 4.0. AUTHORS
The asr driver was kindly donated by Adaptec and is maintained by Mark Salyzyn <mark_salyzyn@adaptec.com>. This manual page was written by Mark Salyzyn and fixed up by Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven <asmodai@FreeBSD.org>. BSD
July 14, 2004 BSD
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