Arrogant chat

[HipHoper]

Well....Joined the chat few weeks ago to talk about some software raid setups, and boy.....these chat people are so arrogant.....
Told them had played with SI3132 Pci-X cards and right away some started to brag about their 200$+ hardware cards....
After that some guys told me you can set Raid 1 on xp pro without a card, And the last time I checked, you'll need to patch some files because it's not an ability that comes out of the box with xp pro.....
anyway i was accused i have no clue.....It's time for them to pull out some fingers from up their BEEP ........
Anyone succeded installing Raid 1 on xp successfully to his/her satisfaction without patching files ?

[Rifleman5150]

Arrogance? You simply did not like the answers you were given. Nobody "bragged" about anything. It was simply stated that your silicone image card was a software card, the cheapest thing made, that nobody had seen one truely work well, and that you were better off with Windows RAID than trying to deal with one of those SI cards.

You then insisted and argued that since there was a chip on a board that it was hardware RAID. An image of a hardware RAID card was posted to show that a true hardware card has a processor and RAM for doing the RAID functions.

The people were trying to educate you and provide you with some insight.

To me what is arrogant is to buy the cheapest stuff you can find, ask for free help, and when you don't like the fact people tell you it won't work you misrepresent what occurred while badmouthing the people you "expect" to help for free when all they were trying to do from the beginning was help.

On behalf of myself only (one of the arrogant chat people); Good luck in your efforts.

[HipHoper]

Hello Rifleman,

As a matter of fact I didn't consider you as one of the most arrogant people, Although your respond did let me re-think it.

I might not be at your level of RAID expertise, But as I mentioned to YOU on the chat few days ago, The cheap SI3132 card I've talked about is NOT PURE software raid. It has a BIOS and DOES MIRROR DATA IN NON WINDOWS ENIVROMENT (Acronis TI which I believe is based on some kind of linux for example - Which as far as I know could not be made in non raid chipsets).

Regarding the "You better off with windows raid", Well your well thought friends forgot to remind that you need to "edit" some windows files in order to access RAID on xp pro (Although I mentioned it from what i recalled from my past windows raid testing, But telling me that I have no clue or that disks need to dynamic - That's ok as long as you are "in the knowing" - Sorry to tell you that that is arrogant and not helpful).

"The people were trying to educate you and provide you with some insight" - Yeah right, Even prison name was change to correction facility....lol.....There are a bit more wise way to teach a person a thing or to tell him that he's incorrect (You can look at my posts over the years on the forums and see that I'm always ask and answered in polite, Gentle and uplifting way - Which was not the case at the chat).

"To me what is arrogant is to buy the cheapest stuff you can find, ask for free help, and when you don't like the fact people tell you it won't work you misrepresent what occurred while badmouthing the people you "expect" to help for free when all they were trying to do from the beginning was help."

Well...first of all it DOES work. Secondly I see nothing wrong in buying cheap hardware that perform to the specifications of your needs. If I only need Raid 1 mirroring solution on a simple documents server, I think it's a waste of money to buy hardware raid card (Especially when most of them come with PCI bus which is limited to 133mb/s speed). I don't know if i can call it "help". I was just told that what I've bought is no good, That I should buy an hardware raid, And that xp pro dynamic discs can work in raid 1, And i can't make it to work because of a lack of knowledge.

I wrote to you out of respect for the help you tried to provide, But there's a way to communicate with other people that is more respectful to them and to you.

[Rifleman5150]

I'm going to step away from the most of that, and only state that your insistance in a wrong assumption is where the friction comes from.

You admit you don't know much about the subject and continue arguing that simply because you have a card that has a BIOS (which is nothing more than software programmed to a chip) that it is hardware RAID. It is not. The card you have is a software controller.

Please for the love of pete do some simple searches and read since you will not take the word of the professionals you were seeking help from.

As stated, people were trying to educate you and you insist they're wrong, so they gave up. Chat is not a place for long drawn out debate, you ask a question and someone does their best to explain it. When you state you do not know much on a subject but start arguing that people are wrong when they clearly are not, it tends to rub folk the wrong way.

From a quick search on bing "What is the Difference Between Software and Hardware RAID?"

What is the Difference Between Software and Hardware RAID?
RAID can be implemented either by a dedicated hardware device or through software.

In hardware RAID, the drives are attached to a controller card with a dedicated processor chip. The controller card handles the creation of the RAID and any parity calculations that must be made and presents the storage to the operating system as though each array were a single drive instead of an array of several physical drives. Using hardware RAID, an operating system does not need to know anything about RAID since it simply sees what it believes to be physical disks. True hardware RAID controllers are based on SCSI controllers or SAS (Serial-Attached-SCSI) controllers. While there are a few IDE-based or SATA-based RAID controllers that are true hardware RAID controllers in the conventional sense, in many cases these cards are actually driver-based RAID as explained below.

In software RAID, the creation of the array and all of the calculations involved are handled by software (most often by the OS itself). This does add a small amount of additional overhead to the system CPU, but in most systems it is a negligible amount.

What is Driver-based RAID or Fake-RAID?
Some "RAID cards", most notably a large number of SATA (serial ATA) RAID controllers are marketed as though they are true hardware RAID controllers -- when in fact they are little more than plain SATA controllers that are shipped with a device driver (usually Windows-only) that implements software RAID at a driver level instead of in the OS kernel. In these devices, the driver passes the tasks of creating the arrays, calculating parity, and etc., to the system CPU -- thus differing little in effect from software RAID as discussed above.

[Matridom]

Wow, talk about drama. Having missed the majority of the conversation in question, i can't comment overly much unless i review it. However it seems to me from what has been discussed here, that the main issue is a difference of attitude regarding providing help and what is expected. Having been helping in the chat for well over 7 years, i do have some insight there. Chat is quick with little time to ponder answers and provide fully referenced arguments with links. If you where responding to someone in the forums, you could easily spend 15 minutes researching an answer and providing facts to back it up.

Just to prove a point, i researched on Raid and XP, took me about 3 minutes to find this and about 20 minutes to make sure the post says what i really want it to say. I will admit this; if i was doing this in chat, you would be lucky to get the link as i do work for a living and volunteer my time to chat, so in-depth research to support information I'm 99% sure about is a waste of my time. Right now I'm at home and have leisure to look things up.


http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308424
here is the relevant sections:

Dynamic Disks and Volumes
Dynamic disk storage supports volume-oriented disks. You create the following volume types only on dynamic disks:

* New simple volumes.
* Volumes that span multiple disks (spanned volumes and striped volumes).
* Volumes that are fault-tolerant (mirrored volumes and RAID-5 volumes).

Volumes on dynamic disks are called dynamic volumes. Dynamic disks can support up to 2,000 dynamic volumes per disk (although the recommended number of volumes is 32 or less per disk).

Local access to dynamic volumes (and to the data that the dynamic volumes contain) is limited to Microsoft Windows 2000 and Microsoft Windows XP Professional-based computers.

The article goes on to walk someone, step by step how to do it.
(for those that might not know, stripped = raid 0, mirrored = raid 1)




Because chat interaction is so much faster, it's more blunt and less "politically correct". It's very much "Tell it how it is", if that seems like arrogance to you, then perhaps you need to grow a thicker skin, learn how to deal with criticism or admit mistakes. If you think someone is wrong, rather then resorting to sarcasm, taunting or veiled insults, ask for clarification on why the opinion or advice is such a way and be prepared to wait for an explanation. You could also provide proof to support your point of view.

If we really want to get down to it, I'm 99% sure that the particular conversation in question is still on my screen on my work computer. If you really want me to, I'll review it as an unbiased person and provide my opinion on what went wrong where. It would however have to wait till Wed when i'm back in the office.

In regards to hardware raid vs software raid.. Rifleman clearly addressed that issue. But to give you food for thought, I used to have an old IDE controller card, a Promise Ultra/ATA66 it was a fantastic card for $25. Flash the Raid version bios and solder a resistor, and it becames the FastTrack66 RAID controller (MSRP $100). Link

Nifty hunh?

[HipHoper]

Rifleman and Mat,

I appreciate the time you both took to explain your points of view, and to gather technical details

Mat was right, It's not stricly about the technical issue itself, But the way it was played out.
Maybe my expectation from the chat was very different from what it is, And was based on what I've experienced on the forum itself.
I don't know about growing some thicker skin, But sometimes it's good to wake up and check yourself and the way you respond to people.

Anyway - Raid or not - I wish you an excellent week

[Platypus]

Perhaps both parties would be best to take a small step back. And perhaps both will accept the judgement of the originators of the disputed subjects?

For the SI3232, Silicon Image define in the Reference Design Brief linkable from here:

http://www.siliconimage.com/products...x?id=32&ptid=1

"A Silicon Image software RAID driver enables RAID 0, 1, and BIG (drive spanning)..."

and:

"Silicon Image provides customers with drivers for the Windows and Linux operating systems for both RAID and non-RAID operations."

The RAID works in environments like Acronis TI because the driver that implements the software RAID is available from SI, and Acronis have included it in TrueImage's driver database.

For Windows RAID in XP, following your link Matridom to:

307880 How To Create a Mirrored Volume in Windows XP

"You cannot create mirrored volumes on computers that are running Windows XP Home Edition, Windows XP Professional or Windows XP 64-Bit Edition."

I believe this is the basis on which HipHoper is objecting to what he's being told about Windows mirroring.

I doubt if there's much point continuing arguing he said/she said. I've long viewed chat as a distinctly non-cuddly environment, and avoided it myself. (Being the cuddly Platypus that I am.)

[HipHoper]

Thanks for the info Platypus.

The thing is that I've tried to edit 3 files that was suggest on some sites in order to activate the raid support in xp pro sp3 (Dmadmin.exe ,Dmboot.sys ,Dmconfig.dll), but in one of the files the text wasn't located where it mentioned it would (maybe it has to so with the xp hebrew enabled version i use), So I couldn't make this "patching" work.
It might be the way I've copied them to the proper folder (Used mini-xp live boot cd instead of xp in recovery mode).
Anyway the Si3132 did provided the solution I needed, So as long as I have this simple solution, I'm satisfied.

Thank you

[Matridom]

For Windows RAID in XP, following your link Matridom to:

307880 How To Create a Mirrored Volume in Windows XP

"You cannot create mirrored volumes on computers that are running Windows XP Home Edition, Windows XP Professional or Windows XP 64-Bit Edition.

I had seen that Platypus, the only issue i have is that your article is targeted at creating the array in server from an XP workstation and is 2 years older then the one i referenced, I'm suspecting that a service pack added raid functionality.

This one, http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314343 has this to say about it:

NOTE: Dynamic disks are not supported on portable computers or on Windows XP Home Edition-based computers.

You cannot create mirrored volumes or RAID-5 volumes on Windows XP Home Edition, Windows XP Professional, or Windows XP 64-Bit Edition-based computers.

This one is dated 2007 and seems the most accurate

I decided to take the easy route and test it. What i have found out is the following.

OS drive. nothing, though it seems to think mirroring is supported, the option is greyed out.
Non-OS drive. Spanned and Striped supported

XP pro, fully updated, NO manual modifications (photo for proof)

End result, it DOES work, just a few pesky restrictions .

[HipHoper]

Mat,

So buttom line is that the RAID doesn't work out of the box if I understand it correctly ?
Thanks for checking it out. what amazed me was to see that you had 5GB hard drives !!! .....hahahahah....Where did you get these !? I thought that ther are only 4.3 and 6.4 drives....Of course unless it's some kind of virtual machine....

[Matridom]

Mat,

So buttom line is that the RAID doesn't work out of the box if I understand it correctly ?
Thanks for checking it out. what amazed me was to see that you had 5GB hard drives !!! .....hahahahah....Where did you get these !? I thought that ther are only 4.3 and 6.4 drives....Of course unless it's some kind of virtual machine....

I don't have a new install of XP without any updates or patches to test with. However, it's a fully updated with no modifications, so to my eyes, this is an "Out of the box" setup. so to me, the answer is "Yes, it works out of box".

Drivers + patches are part of the basic installation of any OS in my opinion. Anyone who intentionally refuses to apply security patches without extremely good reasons is an idiot as far as i'm concerned.

It's a virtual machine running on a hyper-v server at my office. I remoted in to run the tests. I can manage the servers from my home system, but i can't see the screen of my laptop sitting at my office desk

In regards to mirroring, Tomorrow, I'll test with a larger empty drive and see if it's supported or not. I'm suspecting it is.