RAID software raid... confusion easy ubuntu method ?

[Les Gray]

Am Donnerstag, den 07.02.2008, 16:45 +1100 schrieb Gabriel Noronha:

<snip>
> Is there a linux software raid which is nicer than the one which has to
> work with windows ?

Yes. There are a few good howtos out there. I found this one on the
Ubuntu forums -
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=408461&highlight=raid+howto

I've never used RAID myself, though, because I don't think it makes much
sense in the home user setting. It just adds another layer of complexity
to your system that could be a source of problems, while offering little
in the way of extra performance.

> 2nd question will installing 64bit ubuntu make vmware more buggy ?

Quite the opposite, I would have thought. One of the things that the
64-bit environment has over the 32-bit is that it's supposed to make
virtualisation perform better.

Running 64-bit Ubuntu brings its own problems, though, especially when
it comes to software compatibility. I installed 64-bit during the Edgy
release cycle and found that you need to go through a lot of workarounds
to get things like browser plugins and some multimedia codecs to work
properly. This is because a lot of this software is not available in
64-bit versions or, if it is, it lacks important functionality.

In the end I thought the extra effort wasn't worth it and went back to
32-bit, where 99% of home users are, anyway. You might think differently
if you do lots of media encoding or other CPU-intensive tasks or you
need to address more than 64GB of RAM.

btw, when I can get around to it I'm going to install WinXP in a VM
using Virtualbox, which is supposed to be easier to set up than vmware.

> Aside question since every 2nd new motherboard these days ships with
> "RAID" why is it so hard to set it up on Ubuntu.

You don't have to use the RAID if you don't want to. I have 2 SATA disks
in my desktop and I just disabled the RAID ROM in the BIOS. The disks
just run as 2 separate, 'ordinary' SATA drives.