[ale] Linux support for Intel Matrix Storage Manager?

[Jeff Hubbs]

>2. Is it common practice to put the root partition on the RAID along with 
>the other partitions, or to use a regular drive separate from the RAID for 
>this?
>
Much depends on why you're using RAID in the first place.  If 
disk-failure survivability is the goal, then nothing should be on *any* 
drive that will be bring you down or keep you from booting if it goes 
out - not root, not swap, nothing. 

I've developed a pet peeve since disk drives started going beyond 9GB or 
so.  I don't like splitting up individual physical disk drives into 
matching sets of partitions so that I can make RAID volumes across 
corresponding partitions on the various drives.  Why?  Because if one 
partition on one drive develops a bad block, I have to disrupt healthy 
(and potentially more critical) RAID volumes when I pull the drive with 
the bad block, and I have to endure degraded disk I/O while ALL the RAID 
volumes rebuild at once when I put the replacement drive in.

This is why I wish that the industry would still produce 2, 4, and 8GB 
drives that are just butt-fast and butt-reliable.  It seems to me that 
the dot-com-boom drive to sell 1U and 2U servers forced these two- and 
four-drive configurations on the world had a lot to do with making 
multiple RAID volumes across the same set of drives a common practice.  
That, and WinNT's default "C Drive = Only Drive" combined with admins 
who had never before dealt with multi-disk/RAID systems and how you can 
use different kinds of drives and RAID levels to optimize a machine for 
what it's going to be doing.