Re: Hardware RAID setup
On Tue, 8 Apr 2003, Bill Moseley wrote:
> I bought parts for a new machine a while back and finally have time to
> build it. I purchased a 3Ware IDE Escalade two-port hardware raid card.
> My plan is to install two drives in RAID 1 configuration.
>
7000-2, right? Good reliable cards, easy to setup.
One drive per cable/port.
When the machine is booting, there will be an option to hit alt-3, to go
into the 3ware's bios setup.
You can setup the raid-1 array there, it should be pretty simple.
Then you continue booting and install debian.
> I do not plan on having any drives connected to the motherboard IDE
> connectors. Thus, the plan is to install to and boot from the RAID 1
> array.
Indeed, the 3ware supports this quite nicely, just tell your bios to boot
off other or scsi, whichever it may be.
> Not having experience with hardware raid, I kind of assumed that the array
> would be somewhat transparent to the OS -- in other words look like a
> single drive. From googling I think that is not true, so I'm trying to
> get a idea of what it does look like. Which is why I'm posting...
Yes.
On the 3ware, it will show up as /dev/sda
Download and run either their gui 3dm software, or the tw_cli commandline
program.
Make sure you run a verify once you get the system up and running, it
doesn't do it by itself.
> I understand I'll need SCSI support and 3ware Hardware ATA-RAID support
> (CONFIG_BLK_DEV_3W_XXXX_RAID) enabled in the kernel. I'm not clear what
> that driver provides, though. My boot CD is based on the bf2.4 floppies
the bf2.4 has proper support for the 3ware right out of the box.
> I'm also not clear how the installation process will go -- which is really
> my question. Again, I kind of expected it to be a normal install, as if I
> was installing to a single drive.
Exactly like a regular drive, that's what's so nice about the 3ware cards.
I've got a 7500-4 sitting on my desk with 4 250 gig drives plugged into
it, on a raid5. 100 meg per second reads and about 20-25 meg per second
writes, in raid5.
Mike
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