Re: Onboard raid controllers a problem?
Steve Dondley wrote:
Is anyone out there running a AMD64 system with onboard raid
controllers? Any problems? I'm looking at buying a server with a
Tyan Thunder K8S Pro S2882G3NR motherboard with an onboard cotnroller
but the server complany states on their website that:
"Support for onboard RAID controllers has been depreciated in the
Linux 2.6 Kernel. If you desire RAID the system may be configured with
software RAID or you may select a hardware RAID controller."
Can anyone out there back this up or refute it?
--
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I have a Thunder 2885 with the same on board SATA RAID (sil3114).
I can tell you that the situation is the same as it was with the
HighPoint HPT372 in my desktop machine. The RAID works for Windows with
the driver, but support is deprecated in 2.6 kernel.
This is because it's a half assed soft/RAID that depend on the drivers
to function properly. And we all know that drivers = software.
What does this mean?
Buy the server.
When you're setting it up, install mdadm
<http://packages.debian.org/stable/admin/mdadm> and use that to setup
Linux kernel based software raid.
I haven't confirmed this with anyone, but my suspicion is that using md
raid on the sil3114 chip (with linux-2.6.[>=9]) yields the same or
better performance than using either their (Silicon Image
<http://www.siliconimage.com/support/downloadresults.aspx?pid=28&bios=0&drivers=1&sataraid=0&;>)
linux drivers or the windows drivers.
The server I setup has :
* 4 200GB Segate drives connected to the sil3114
* 2 RAID1 volumes (/dev/md0 and /dev/md1) 200GB each.
* Disks 1<->2 mirrored and 3<->4
* LVM uses both md devices as physical volumes (pvcreate /dev/md0 &&
pvcreate /dev/md1)
* 1 volume group (vg1) for the entire 400GB of storage (vgcreate vg1
/dev/md0 /dev/md1)
* /dev/mapper/vg1-homelv mounted as /home (150GB) - 2 stripes
* /dev/mapper/vg1-varlv mounted as /var (20GB) - 2 stripes
* root partition is located on a 5th hard drive connected to the ide
connector.
To set it up I followed the instructions on
http://xtronics.com/reference/SATA-RAID-Debian.htm and the LVM-Howto
(http://tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/). You can use the 'missing' technique
in the first link if you intend to boot off the raid device.
BE WARNED : By default Debian Sarge AMD64 doesn't load the sil3114
module very early in the boot process. I think it's actually loaded by
hotplug.
What I did was :
* edit /etc/mkinitrd/mkinitrd.conf and change MODULES=most to
MODULES=dep
* edit /etc/mkinitrd/modules and add the following modules :
o scsi_mod
libata
sr_mod
sd_mod
sata_sil
/etc/mdadm.conf has the auto=yes option at the end of the configuration
lines. This ensures that mdadm will create the device nodes at bootup.
If you intend to use LVM with md, make sure to read the instructions in
LVM as it relates to md devices. By default they're disabled, and not
scanned for.
I'm sorry for just rambling, but I hope something I've said will help.
Regards,
Marc DM
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