[CentOS] Centos and Software RAID

Fri May 26 23:34:14 UTC 2006
Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com>

On Fri, 2006-05-26 at 16:56, Barry L. Kline wrote:

> It's doubtful that your on-board RAID controller is going to work with
> Linux.  Most of the on-board controllers are really nothing more than
> two SATA channels with the driver (for Windows) providing the RAID
> functionality.  Thus, you're really not gaining hardware RAID, in spite
> of what you are led to believe by the BIOS options.  That's why Linux is
> reporting it as two drives.
> 
> You have two choices:  1) Buy a hardware RAID controller (my choice
> being the 3ware brand), or 2) use software RAID.  Since that's what
> you'd be getting anyways if you were using this board with Windows and
> the appropriate driver, you're not losing anything.
> 
> FWIW I've had no problems whatsoever when using software RAID. I use it
> on many of my servers.

Note that unless it has changed recently, SATA drives don't pass
errors up to the software raid layer correctly.  If a drive
dies it doesn't get kicked out as it should.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
   lesmikesell at gmail.com