V-Raid driver & write cache

[Digiface]

I got a problem with most VIA V-Raid drivers. Problem is that "write caching" option is disabled and also grayed out. I have tried many versions and only where i can enable write caching seems to be that (faulty) 5.11. I got now those new 5.13 drivers.

Is there any utility to enable write cache? I got Seagate sata drives.

[Blue_MiSfit]

My advice? Bypass soft-RAID altogether. It's kludgy and unreliable at best.

They disabled write caching because it's buggy, maybe even in hardware. I wouldn't mess with it :) Data loss is t3h sux.

~MiSfit

[Digiface]

So what i gonna do now?

[foxyshadis]

I would absolutely never ever trust VIA for something that important. They have the worst reputation for bad drivers, flaky hardware, and corruption. NVraid and Intel's raid are more reliable, about on par with Windows', but only dedicated $100+ raid cards are actually rock solid, won't lose data ever. On the cheap, you'd be better off using Windows' software raid or another software mirroring solution. This page explains it. (http://www.techimo.com/articles/index.pl?photo=149)

Personally, I just use realtime backup (writes are logged and backup runs when the system is idle), but then I'm on a laptop and have no access to RAID. I'm also not really worried about losing an hour or two of work if the drive fails.

[Digiface]

What about the performance?

[foxyshadis]

Performance isn't amazing, but it isn't terrible either. Nvidia and Intel both have somewhat better performance, though nothing beats a dedicated card. (Windows RAID-5 is dog-slow, but most motherboard RAID-5 is also less than half the speed of hardware.)

You can make it, test it out, break it, and go back to Via in the future without much hassle, but it's a good idea to back up first anyway.

[Digiface]

Registry states that write caching for my sata drives is enabled. ??

[Shinigami-Sama]

you can get a decent raid card from ebay for 100$

solaris has decent software raid on their SPARC boxes, I'm not sure about their X86_64 machines though

but overall theres nothing better than hardware raid, though they can lack some features like easy customization, and sometimes hotspares hopefully they should though

[Digiface]

How can i now really know, is write caching enabled or not?????