Re: [CentOS] Some 3Ware questions

Peter Arremann loony@loonybin.org wrote:

When initializing a raid 1, the controller wipes out all data according to the manuals. Every now and then you hear from people that say that the controller copies everything from disk1 to disk2 and if your IDE controller sector mapping matches what the 3ware controller does, you can keep your data in tact.

Actually, for RAID-1, 3Ware does _not_ using additional blocking/organization, and does a direct mirror. I.e., the disks _can_ be used "normally."

For RAID-0, 10 and 5, 3Ware uses 32KiB blocking and the volumes are completely _unusable_ by anything else AFAIK (maybe LVM2-MD?).