Hardware RAID transparency to software?

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See this story about Acrobat complaining if it's on a RAID array. It thinks
it's on more than one computer.

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1780396,00.asp#talkback

How is this even possible? I thought RAID was supposed to be transparent.

And the same goes for Partition Magic. Why isn't it insulated by BIOS
function calls? And how can it be compatible with RAID 0 and 5 but not 1?

http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/powerquest.nsf/6c360f88152ecfce88256e91005066ac/dd9378cfe348f5bc88256e75007c7fbd?OpenDocument&prod=Norton%20PartitionMagic&ver=8.x&src=sg&pcode=npmagic&svy=&csm=no


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Tom Del Rosso wrote:

> See this story about Acrobat complaining if it's on a RAID array. It
> thinks it's on more than one computer.
>
> http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1780396,00.asp#talkback
>
> How is this even possible? I thought RAID was supposed to be transparent.

Didn't say anything about hardware RAID. Most RAID-1 implementations are
software. The cheap boards such as the ones from Promise and Highpoint are
software RAID with a BIOS that allows booting from the soft array--with
that type of setup anything that can perform low-level disk access can
identify the individual drives. One would not expect a product such as
Acrobat to do low level access but the paranoid management at Adobe seem to
think that making more money is more important than reasonable software
design.

Why anybody would buy an Adobe product is beyond me. Overpriced,
underfeatured, their only real strength is that "everybody" knows how to
use their junk. If Corporate America is going to Acrobat en masse, I'm
_really_ glad that I bailed on Corporate America.

Even their friggin' _reader_ has turned into a baroque monstrosity.

> And the same goes for Partition Magic. Why isn't it insulated by BIOS
> function calls? And how can it be compatible with RAID 0 and 5 but not 1?

It's the nature of Partition Magic that it _must_ do low level access to do
its tricks.

http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/powerquest.nsf/6c360f88152ecfce88256e91005066ac/dd9378cfe348f5bc88256e75007c7fbd?OpenDocument&prod=Norton%20PartitionMagic&ver=8.x&src=sg&pcode=npmagic&svy=&csm=no

I suspect that there's something they're not telling you. Of course being
Symantec I'm not surprised.

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--John
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(was jclarke at eye bee em dot net)

 

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Tom Del Rosso <ng01@att.net.invalid> wrote in message
news:0Flde.684923$w62.452713@bgtnsc05-news.ops.worldnet.att.net...

> See this story about Acrobat complaining if it's on a
> RAID array. It thinks it's on more than one computer.

> http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1780396,00.asp#talkback

> How is this even possible? I thought RAID was supposed to be transparent.

Not necessarily when a software vendor is playing silly buggers
trying to work out when its installed on more than one PC and
some clown designed that so badly that it fails with a RAID system.

> And the same goes for Partition Magic.
> Why isn't it insulated by BIOS function calls?

The nature of those apps means that they need
to do more than just basic BIOS calls to the drives.

> And how can it be compatible with RAID 0 and 5 but not 1?

Most likely there is some particular op that breaks with RAID1.
Operations like symantec say stuff like the below when there
is a known problem with something with RAID1 which isnt
readily fixable, not that nothing ever works with RAID1.

> <http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/powerquest.nsf/6c360f88152ecfce88256e91005066ac/dd9378cfe348f5bc88256e75007c7fbd?OpenDocument&prod=Norton%20PartitionMagic&ver=8.x&src=sg&pcode=npmagic&svy=&csm=no>