我打算组raid10，用alternate cd， destop live cd安装全部检测成单独的4个硬盘的情况下，我在网上查找资料发现，hardware raid和software raid不是一般是否硬件软件这么区别，大部分人都认为有raid卡，就属于hardware raid。请问一下各位高手，我这个卡到底是hardware raid还是software raid？
另外，我听说，如果是硬raid，安装过程中是不会把组好的raid检测成4块单独的硬盘，而且能很简单的完成整个过程，和一般的安装差不多，是这样的么？Be careful, unless you get a high end RAID card you will get a controller that masquerades as hardware RAID but is actually software. Unless you get a RAM specification with it and a pricetag to match it won't really work. I just got a SATA Raid controller for about €35. It's excellent, supports up to 4 sata devices on 6 ports. But although you configure the card in a bios like screen, it is still software raid. Suse 10 identified it as such and warned me. I can see the two disks seperately. If this was hardware RAID this would be impossible.
Anyway moral of the story, software raid in linux is pretty good. you don't need a special controlller, though seperate channels would be nice. Even if your distro goes belly up, you can still use the software raid as the partitions are tagged as raid even before the formatting. If the controller you're looking at says it supports only RAID 1, 0 or 1+0 (10) then it is most likely not hardware raid. Hardware should support a minimum of RAID 5.
Have you looked at LVM? If you are just looking at combining to discs it's great. Plus you can add to it and subtract (?). There is no redundancy but if a disc fails the others are unaffected. I have two 320GB disks in an LVM volume on this server as I type.
Good luck with it, if you have any more questions I can answer, I hope I can help.
我在adaptec的官方论坛又找到一句这样的话：
发现hardware raid列表中并没有我的这款Adaptec SCSI Card 39320-R，更加坚定了我区分他们的不是硬件和软件的概念。No, the Ultra160 SCSI cards are not capable of hardware or software level RAID.
SCSI controllers that are capable of hardware RAID are listed at:
http://www.adaptec.com/en-US/support/raid/#scsi_raid
出自：http://ask.adaptec.com/scripts/adaptec_ ... _topview=1
