[Sussex] RAID, and building a server.

[Steve Williams]

Mark,

Mark Harrison (Groups) wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> It's time for the next machine to make the conversion from Windows to 
> Linux.
> 
> The machine in question is my trusty server.
> 
> I'm quite tempted with the idea of building one, rather than buying a 
> pre-made box, simply because I'd like to give it a go.
> 
> Does anyone have any recommendations in terms of SATA RAID controllers 
> for linux use. In an ideal world, I'd go for an on-motherboard SATA RAID 
> controller that presented to the O/S as if the array were a single 
> drive, but I'm not sure that such things exist?
> 

I have an ASUS A7N8X-E motherboard with Silicon Image RAID on-board (Sil 
3112a Chipset). It's supported fine by Gentoo and Kernel >2.6.9 at 
least. (I haven't tried it with earlier kernels.)

However, Linux doesn't see the controller as a true RAID controller. You 
have to set up the drives to use Linux Software RAID - which is fun. The 
  other problem is that I also run a Windows XP installation on the same 
array using the supplied WinXP 32 bit driver, and it does appear as a 
single drive. If Windows XP throws it toys out of the pram and you have 
to reset your PC, the next time you boot into Linux you may have a 
problem with your RAID devices being out of sync. You can only re-sync 
the root device if you boot from another source, e.g. knopix cd.

You might be better off with something like one of the Adaptec SATA RAID 
controllers.

Steve Williams

> Mark
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Sussex mailing list
> Sussex at mailman.lug.org.uk
> http://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/sussex
>