Barry L. Kline <mailto:blkline at 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