In article <525fd2f695e5e2f3215fc3c468a046e3.squirrel at host290.hostmonster.com>, <m.roth at 5-cent.us> wrote: > Tony Mountifield wrote: > > I am trying to install CentOS5 on a new HP DL360e G8 with B120i disk > > controller. It appears that a proprietary HP driver is needed for it. > > > > I found a useful description at > > http://www.linuxhelp.in/2013/08/Installing-centos-on-HP-Proliant-DL360e-Gen8-with-B120i-controller.html > > > > I have a pair of hard drives to use as a RAID1 mirror. > > Have you already set up the drives in the firmware to present to the o/s? > If you haven't done that before, on a system that has all the drives going > through the hardware controller, you need to know that you *must* go that > way. After, the o/s will see it correctly as SATA/scsi. > > With Dells and a PERC, even if you don't want RAID, you *must* create it > on your drives as raid 0? Something, and then it presents that as a drive. Yes, I've been through the drive setup in the BIOS to create a RAID1 mirrored volume, and specified in the BIOS to use the Smart Array controller rather than plain AHCI mode. Without HP's proprietary driver, the kernel just sees the separate drives as AHCI anyway, and according to the above instructions, even *with* the right driver it is necessary to blacklist the AHCI driver to prevent spurious detection of the bare drives. > > My question to people who may have been this way already is: is it worth > > my fiddling around with that procedure to get the RAID controller working, > > performance-wise, or might I just as well use AHCI mode with kernel > > mdraid? > > Intel fakeRAID, I do that. For a real h/w RAID controller, you not only > should use it, you *must* use it. As I said, the BIOS offers me the option of bypassing the RAID and just using the bare disks in AHCI mode, which I could easily do with mdraid. I have no problem understanding the options and following the procedures. My question was just to see whether other people's experience would suggest it was worth the effort of going down the hardware RAID and proprietary driver route. Cheers Tony -- Tony Mountifield Work: tony at softins.co.uk - http://www.softins.co.uk Play: tony at mountifield.org - http://tony.mountifield.org