Question about raid on machine

[girir]

Hi,

I just ordered a machine from a vendor. It has 2 80GB SATA harddisks and I believe it uses a Intel ICH7R SATA controller. The OS is CentOS 5.1.

The vendor gave the machine with both hard disks in a RAID 0 format, so it shows a whole 160GB. If I want to convert to a RAID 1 layout, would I need to go to the bios or can I do it from the command line itself?

Also, in the future does it make more sense to go with software raid as opposed to hardware raid?

Thanks for your help!

 

[Don Khaled]

I prefer if you do it through the BIOS.

Hardware RAID is better performance compared to software RAID, as software RAID requires more CPU cycles and more power usage. But if you are looking for the price tag, then software RAID is cheaper.

 

[Lazn_Work]

If the OS is preinstalled, changing the RAID level will mean reinstalling everything, and any data on the drives to be lost.

Chipset level RAID is not real hardware RAID, but for RAID 0 or 1 it makes no real difference as there is no parity calculations required. And you'd configure it in the BIOS if you are going to use the ICH7R's RAID. If you decide to use software RAID, then you still need to go into the BIOS and setup the drives as two stand alone drives, and in this case I see little advantage to doing this.

I'd just do it in the BIOS as it is simpler and RAID 1 should allow you to read your drives with any controller.