Flash Raid on a Raq 4

[Davesworld]

As some few of you may have read, the Cobalt friendly builds of 2.0 Beta are now working again on the 3000 series Cobalts. Thanks again to weizen_42.

You may have read also that I had tested dual flash raid on a 550 after some kernel config changes to make raid devices bootable from the Cobalt rom. I am now testing Raid on two 512MB CF cards running in a Raq 4i in Raid configuration and it runs beautifully. One CF is a Transcend Industrial Grade 512MB CF card and the other is a cheapo PNY 512MB CF lightweight card. I figured a mishmash of dissimilar hardware would be a decent test. The PNY doesn't support nearly the modes nor speed of the Transcend but the kernel lets you know the uid's are different (a heads up) but does not complain about it.

I'm planning on ordering some hot swappable flash readers that are designed to fit in a standard 3.5" spot and have exactly the same IDE connector and power connecter in the same location as a standard 3.5" IDE drive. This means they would work on a 550 using the drive trays as well. It would be akin to a hollow 3.5" IDE drive with an IDE to FLASH adapter inside with slots on the outside that are hot swappable. These are not nearly as cheap as the ones we may use now but every Cobalt we are dealing with has two 3.5" bays that are empty using a direct CF to IDE adapter. The ones I have seen are not limited to a CF card either. I have successfully run IPCop and Raqcop from a MicroSD drive smaller than my thumbnail and it actually performs quite well.