[CentOS] centos 5.5 install + intel raid

aurfalien at gmail.com aurfalien at gmail.com
Thu Jan 6 20:57:32 UTC 2011


> On 01/06/11 11:11 AM, Gene Brandt wrote:
>> Thanks for that bit of advice. I've never been able to recover from
>> hardware raid on any Intel system. The software raid is simple to
>> configure and it works!
>
> its not actually hardware raid.
>
> when you set the 'raid mode' in the BIOS, at power up it sets a bit in
> the ICH chip which changes its PCI DeviceID from 'regular SATA
> controller' to 'Intel Matrix FakeRaid'.    thats *ALL* it does, change
> the device ID. no other hardware changes.    the controller is still a
> plain old multiport SATA controller.
>
> the device ID is used to pick which driver by the OS plug-n-play
> stuff.   the regular setting choses the regular SATA driver while the
> 'fakeraid' setting loads the fakeraid driver (dmraid in Linux).    the
> fakeraid driver implements all the raid in the device driver.     
> This is
> only really useful for MS Windows non-Server distributions which don't
> support native mirroring or whatever in the OS.

Hi John,

Another reason to use SW raid which I have switched too.

Although the conversation did generate some really good info.

Yea, that Intel RAID is a real POS.

- aurf



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