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1) Has anyone been able to get their AIC-9410 controller recognized in CentOS 5.3?
I'm working with a Supermicro X7DBR-3 motherboard. It has 2 "ICH Raid Codebase" options in the Bios (Intel and Adaptec); neither of which seem to change Linux's behavior. The interesting part though, choosing either Adaptec or Intel, then performing an 'lspci' always displays "Intel Corp 631xESP/632xESP SATA RAID Controller (rev 09)".
I've seen several people post on a variety of mailing lists (typically using older CentOS revisions), but it doesn't appear many were successful. It seems most swap to software raid.
2) When using this internal host raid controller, shouldn't the raided devices appear as a single device like other traditional scsi controllers?
Regardless of the raid options I choose, Linux still continues to see both drives (/dev/sda and /dev/sdb). Is this a function of being 'HostRAID'?
3) If you've been able to get it to work, which driver did you use?
Thus far, I've tried 2 drivers.
1st driver: adpahci -- Unsuccessful
I downloaded it from supermicro's website. ftp.supermicro.com/driver/SATA/Adaptec_ESB2/Linux/Redhat/adpahci.rhel5.i686.img
After successfully loading the image and inserting the module using kickstart, nothing useful happens, other than several /sys entries added. (NOTE: I had to change the internal cpio archive pathing from `2.6.18-8.el5' to `2.6.18-128.el5').
2nd driver: aic94xx -- Unsuccessful
The driver is built-in via a patch to the Redhat stock kernel.
Other than saying that it's loaded, it also does nothing useful outside of /sys entries. Several mailing lists and documents pointed to using the 'attach_HostRAID' option, however, it doesn't exist. Using this option with `insmod' (or modprobe) fails.
3rd driver: adp94xx -- In the works
I downloaded this driver from Adaptec's website: http://www.adaptec.com/en-US/speed/sas/linux/adp94xx-1_0_8-12_src_tgz.htm
So far, I'm not able to get it to compile because I'm trying to create a patch file so that it incorporates all of the contents of the tarball.
Any ideas on where to go from here? I'd really like to avoid software raid.
Thanks, Kurt
Kurt Newman wrote:
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- Has anyone been able to get their AIC-9410 controller recognized in
CentOS 5.3? [..] Any ideas on where to go from here? I'd really like to avoid software raid.
Get a better RAID controller, from the looks of things that looks to be one of those cheap shit software RAID controllers that depend on the drivers to do most of the work. Supermicro last I checked at least didn't have any boards that had good RAID controllers on them, even their zero channel controllers while I'm sure are probably higher grade then the on board controller still look poor by comparison.
I had a similar situation on a bunch of HP DL320s a couple of years ago, they came with Adaptec hardware "RAID" as well, we found out pretty quick that the drives were corrupting themselves underneath the controller and even doing a "full check" on the drives via the controller said they were good.
Software RAID ended up being what we went with.
Cheap hardware raid is worse than software raid.
nate
On Wed, Aug 26, 2009, nate wrote:
Kurt Newman wrote:
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- Has anyone been able to get their AIC-9410 controller recognized in
CentOS 5.3? [..] Any ideas on where to go from here? I'd really like to avoid software raid.
Get a better RAID controller, from the looks of things that looks to be one of those cheap shit software RAID controllers that depend on the drivers to do most of the work. Supermicro last I checked at least didn't have any boards that had good RAID controllers on them, even their zero channel controllers while I'm sure are probably higher grade then the on board controller still look poor by comparison.
I'll second that. I have a 2U Supermicro box with a X5DPL-TGM main board and Adaptec AIC-8120 on-board controller. CentOS 5.x works fine with the individual drives BIOS configured as JBOD devices, leaving any RAID to Linux software.
We have another 1U Supermicro box with a H8DAR-T main board. This has an Adaptec AIC-8130, but that's disabled in favor of a 3ware controller which does Real Raid(tm).
Bill
I'm trying to install CentOS 4 on a new Supermicro 1U system with an Adaptec 9410 SAS controller. I'm not interested in RAID or anything, just want to install bare on the drive.
But while the installer "sees" the Adaptec controller well enough to load "Adaptec 94xx" drivers, the installer it tells me that there are no drives installed when I try to partition.
I've checked out the drive using the adaptec BIOS utilities, tried formatting it, etc and I see a message about "1 JBOD DRIVE(S)" during the BIOS init before CentOS boots up. When I call SuperMicro, they tell me that I need to get the floppy disk image
ftp://ftp.supermicro.com/driver/SAS/Adaptec/Linux/11699/
but I don't have a floppy disk in the machine, and anaconda does install the 94xx driver, which leads me to believe that there's something else going on.
Any idea where I should go from here? I get the feeling that I'm just missing something basic....
Found the problem. For some reason, JBOD drives won't be recognized by Linux when the card is set up to enable RAID, even with no RAID devices defined.
Another weird thing: this system has a "keyboard controller frequency" setting and the USB keyboard won't be recognized by Linux when it's not set to 6 Mhz. (who woulda thunk?)
Posted for posterity...
-Ben
On Saturday 12 September 2009 12:42:00 Benjamin Smith wrote:
I'm trying to install CentOS 4 on a new Supermicro 1U system with an Adaptec 9410 SAS controller. I'm not interested in RAID or anything, just want to install bare on the drive.
But while the installer "sees" the Adaptec controller well enough to load "Adaptec 94xx" drivers, the installer it tells me that there are no drives installed when I try to partition.
I've checked out the drive using the adaptec BIOS utilities, tried formatting it, etc and I see a message about "1 JBOD DRIVE(S)" during the BIOS init before CentOS boots up. When I call SuperMicro, they tell me that I need to get the floppy disk image
ftp://ftp.supermicro.com/driver/SAS/Adaptec/Linux/11699/
but I don't have a floppy disk in the machine, and anaconda does install the 94xx driver, which leads me to believe that there's something else going on.
Any idea where I should go from here? I get the feeling that I'm just missing something basic....
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Benjamin Smith -
Bill Campbell -
Kurt Newman -
nate