Anders Johansson wrote:
On Saturday 21 June 2008 09:53:31 Bob Williams wrote:
I have two identical Western Digital 1TB SATA2 drives, which I am trying to set up as a RAID1 array. They are attached to a Sil 3124 PCI-X SATA Controller. On booting the machine, pressing F4 gets me to the controller card's setup screen, where I can create, destroy and repair RAIDs. I chose to create a RAID1 array, which duly appeared in the list of logical drives on this screen. I was then asked if I wanted to mirror them now or later, so I chose now. It took hours :(.
Continuing the boot process, I expected the OS (openSUSE 10.3) to see only the logical drive, but YaST partitioner reported two new Western Digital drives, /dev/sdf and /dev/sdg. I can combine them into a software RAID, but that seems wasteful and redundant, given that I've spent GBP85 on a hardware controller.
Well, no you haven't. A hardware controller would have presented the RAID as a single disk. The fact that you see two means that it's a so-called fake-RAID card, where the RAID functionality is in the driver
You would probably do better to use the linux software RAID for two reasons: firstly it's not driver dependent, so it's much easier to replace the hardware if it breaks (these things use their own RAID format, so other cards can't work with them), and secondly, the linux software RAID is generally faster
It looks to me like the fake-RAID functionality of that card is only supported by the precompiled drivers from sci-worx.com, but those haven't been updated since Anno Dazumal (see http://www.sci- worx.com/support/supportsearchresults.aspx?pid=27&cid=3&ctid=2&osid=1&, the latest RAID aware driver is from 2006, for SLES9 and RHEL4, the driver for suse pro 9.3 doesn't know about RAID) so I think you have to go with the software RAID functionality.
Anders
There is a good article about software raid here http://en.opensuse.org/How_to_install_openSUSE_on_software_RAID Note that my system would not boot unless I made the /boot partition NOT on raid. All other partitions can be on raid1. Putting swap on raid1 was a debated issue on this list, but in the end I put my swap on raid1 and all works fine. Jim -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org