On Sun, 2007-07-15 at 17:54 -0400, Bill Schwab wrote:
>
> haywire when it writes too far some day? I have read some statements
> that Linux does not use the bios and is therefore immune to any such
> problems, but I find that hard to believe. Somewhat more sensible was a
> suggestion to disable on-board controllers in favor of an add-on
> controller that knows what to make of the drives. Would such a card
> auto-detect parameters, and/or include its own BIOS? Is there any
> reason not to do something like that? My main concern is to be able to
> later put the drive in another machine w/o worrying about special
> drivers.

Linux doesn't use the BIOS and is therefore immune to that particular
problem. I have a 750GB drive in my secondary server at home, no
special hardware, no crazy hoops to jump through:

# df -h /export
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/Export-Export--vol1
                      688G 129G 525G 20% /export

(You may make fun of me for the funny volume name now; I had never used
Linux LVM before, it's not quite the same as Veritas.)