Re: SATA, RAID, A8N-E, 3800+ help
Keith Ballantyne wrote:
Hi,
I recently bought an Asus A8N-E mobo and AMD64 3800+ CPU. I then
bought RAM, a case, and an ATI 300-based PCI Express 16 video card. I
used netinstall sarge and managed to install 32-bit using the 2.6
kernel (as the 2.4 kernel wouldn't recognize my network card).
...a few days passed, and I realized that I wanted the 64-bit core. I
recompiled the kernel, and then realized there was a 64-bit
distribution, so I downloaded both the testing release (Etch) and the
31r1a netinstalls. 31r1a didn't recognize my onboard network, but Etch
did.
...a few more days passed and I decided to buy 4 SATA II drives in an
attempt to run RAID 0+1. I configured the BIOS and ran the installer,
but the installer sees hda through hdd rather than a single RAID
drive. In subsequent research (including this list archive) it
appears that the BIOS RAID is considered 'inferior' to the software
RAID support in Linux. So, my questions are:
1) Why is the ASUS BIOS RAID inferior to software RAID on Linux?
Not necessarily inferior, but _unnecessary_.
As others have pointed out, this is not a real raid controller. The bios
does
software raid, and the windows driver for the card does software raid
for windows (if you use windows at all, that is.)
The fact that you _need_ a raid driver in window is a strong hint that the
raid is implemented in software - a hw raid controller can be made to look
like a single disk on a standard controller - both linux and windows can
then handle it without special drivers.
So, in order to use a raid with this controller you need a software driver
for it. And one exist - the linux software raid (md). It offers raid
0+1, among
other things. You can get more space from your 4 disks with raid-5, but
raid 0+1 will probably have better performance if you get the stripe
size right.
Note that bios raid and linux sw raid isn't compatible, so you have to
turn bios raid off in order to use linux sw raid. There is no loss
involved in
doing this though.
2) Is it possible to install 31r1a instead of the Etch release (I'm
not overly keen on working with Etch, but will do it if it's a better
64-bit option...In the few days I played with 64-bit Etch it seemed to
work well, but I didn't have most of the utilties I need available
from the installer/package manager).
3) Do I need to flash the BIOS for things to work?
No - linux doesn't use the bios. The bios is only used to set up some
hardware at
power-on time, and to load the linux kernel which then takes over everything
with its own drivers. Flashing the bios is sometimes useful if the old
bios has bugs. Or if you want to do something radical like running
linuxbios.
4) Is ATI 300 support better in Etch?
I haven't tried, but I have the impression that unstable/experimental
have more and better support for 3D. But of course there are more
bugs to stumble over as well. You may want to try xserver-xorg
6.9.0.dfsg.1-4.
(Also upgrade all the accompagnying libx... packages, xserver-common,
libdrm and mesa packages.
Write down the list of packages upgraded, so you can back out if
you hit some showstopper bug.
Helge Hafting
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