Barry L. Kline mailto:blkline@attglobal.net tapped at Friday, May 26, 2006 2:56 PM:
Erick Perez wrote:
I purchased an Intel D945GNT motherboard and it comes in the BIOS with an option to create a RAID 0 or RAID 1 volumes using my existing two SATA disks. However when installing Centos 4.3 x86_64 I see the the installer recognices the two drives and does not "see" the RAID 0. Is that ok? Should I disable the RAID in the BIOS and then go for a LVM+RAID 0 setup in the installer ? Since it will be a server machine I want to gain the performance of RAID 0 without too much complications (i will use ext3 instead of ReiseFS)
Hi Erick.
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.
I'd like to know how things went with software raid when you've lost a drive in a mirror or RAID5. The times that's happened to me, I could never recover the partition - had to always restore from tape. After that point, it was hardware only. Software RAID works fine, as long as there's no problems.
Mark
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On Fri, May 26, 2006 at 03:10:37PM -0700, Mark Schoonover wrote:
Barry L. Kline mailto:blkline@attglobal.net tapped at Friday, May 26, 2006 2:56 PM: I'd like to know how things went with software raid when you've lost a drive in a mirror or RAID5. The times that's happened to me, I could never recover the partition - had to always restore from tape. After that point, it was hardware only. Software RAID works fine, as long as there's no problems.
Never had a problem with that. Always worked fine for me. Had at least 3 different cases like that so far. Always recovered flawlessly.
- -- Rodrigo Barbosa rodrigob@suespammers.org "Quid quid Latine dictum sit, altum viditur" "Be excellent to each other ..." - Bill & Ted (Wyld Stallyns)
Mark Schoonover wrote:
Barry L. Kline mailto:blkline@attglobal.net tapped at Friday, May 26, 2006 2:56 PM:
I'd like to know how things went with software raid when you've lost a drive in a mirror or RAID5. The times that's happened to me, I could never recover the partition - had to always restore from tape. After that point, it was hardware only. Software RAID works fine, as long as there's no problems.
I have lost a drive in a mirror and had no trouble recovering it. The steps are basically the same for a RAID 5 system as they are for the mirror.
What I figured out early on was that I didn't want to be discovering how RAID recovery works while under the gun to get a failed drive replaced. I tried that once and found it extremely stressful.
What you might want to do (assuming that you have an old PC and a couple of old drives around) is build a test system that you can experiment with. I did that and now have a good working knowledge of the recovery steps. ('tho I took good notes because the frequence of this occuring has been, for me, rather low). Failed drive in another machine? BRING IT ON! (okay, okay... I don't want to tempt the gods and *really* have that failure, but I'm not as concerned about it as I once was).
Barry
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Barry L. Kline -
Mark Schoonover -
Rodrigo Barbosa