Hello,
I’m pretty new to FakeRAID vs JBOD in a software RAID, and could use some help/advice. I recently installed 11.4 on a brand new server system that I pieced together, using Intel RAID ICH10r on an ASUS P8P67 Evo board with 2500K Sandy Bridge CPU. I have two RAIDs setup, one RAID-1 mirror for the system drive and /home, and the other consists of four drives in RAID-5 for a /data mount.
Installing 11.4 seemed a bit problematic. I ran into this problem: https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=682766. I magically got around it by installing from the live KDE version with all updates downloaded before the install. When prompted, I specified I would like to use mdadm (it asked me), however it proceeded to setup a dmraid. I suspect this is because I have fake raid enabled via the bios. Am I correct in this? Or should I still be able to use mdadm with bios raid setup?
Anyways, to make a long story short, I now have the server mostly running with dmraid installed vice mdadm. I have read many stories online that seem to indicate that dmraid is unreliable versus mdadm, especially when used with newer SATA drives like I happen to be using. Is it worth re-installing the OS with the drives in JBOD and then having mdadm configure a linux software raid? Are their massive implications one way or another on if I do or do not install mdadm or keep dmraid?
Finally, what could I use to monitor the health and status of a dmraid? mdadm seems to have it’s own monitoring associated with it when I was glazing over the man pages.
Thanks for the advice/help!