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.