Raid 1 Configuration sil3114 Hardware/software?

[chongo2002]

Hi everyone,

I am trying to configure a raid 1 on my machine running 11.1. I have a few issues. I thought I had hardware raid controllers, but from what I have read they are "fake" raid controllers. I have an Intel D865PERLL motherboard with raid (not using) and a pci SIL3114 sata raid controller.

In Yast the raid controller shows up. In the raid controller bios I setup a raid 1 set using 2x250GB seagates. They synced and seem fine. But in Yast under the partition manager each drive shows separately.

dmraid -s -s ouputs:
***Set
name : sil_ajahajajcide
size : 488395120
stride : 0
type : mirror
status : ok
subsets : 0
devs : 2
spares : 0

dmraid -r outputs:
/dev/sda: sil, "sil_ajahajajcide", mirror, ok, 488395120 sectors, data@ 0
/dev/sdb: sil, "sil_ajahajajcide", mirror, ok, 488395120 sectors, data@ 0

So to me everything looks ok, it looks like dmraid picked up the "fake" array. But like mentioned above Yast->Partitioner shows each drive independently, and on top of that I created a partition on sda (drives are empty) using the whole drive and rebooted, the partition was not replicated to sdb. Do I also need to configure a software Linux Raid?

If so what is the point of the sil3114 raid controller?

I want to make sure I have good backups when I start using this raid array.

Thanks.