RAID software/OS

[enhanced08]

is there any software that can do a RAID0 setup on a computer that doesn't have and RAID controllers? i know that winxp and win2k, i beleive, have RAID built in. what about other OS's like Linux, do any of those have RAID built in?

basically what i'm doing is i have a few old PII computers and a bunch of smaller (10-20GB) HDDs i want to use for storage. i'm creating ISO images of all my cds as backups. i want to use RAID0 so that i can combine all the HDDs into a large drive. this way there will only be 1 storage drive per system not 4 that i have to look in to find what i need.

thanks

[Force Flow]

RAID is handled by the hardware, not the software. That's the reason for the RAID controller on the motherboard/RAID card

[enhanced08]

there is software RAID! i have set it up on win2k server! 2 40GB HDDs 1 on primary 1 on secondary IDE controller.

[glc]

You just answered your own question. Use Win2K and dynamic disks, create a spanned volume. The help function in Disk Management tells you how. Note that this is very risky - if one drive takes a dump, you lose everything.

[enhanced08]

i could do that, but is there some third party software i could load on a linux system to do the same? i would like to do this with linux if possible.

[glc]

Moved to Alternative OS.

[mairving]

Vinum (http://www.vinumvm.org/) is one of the best software RAID's out there. It is part of the base distribution of FreeBSD but will also work on the other BSD's. Linux also has software RAID although the name escapes me at this time.