Hi all,
Please bear with me if I sound a little ignorant, there’s a good reason for that - I am. But I’m working on setting up a file server for my small home network and the latest issue I’m running into is getting the RAID to work properly. I’m booting and running OpenSuSe off a single drive, but I added two large drives that I want to set up in a RAID 1 array. This will be used to store all the data for two Windows PCs.
I’m using a motherboard with Intel’s ICH8R chipset but found out early in the game that Linux didn’t seem to recognize any RAID that I set up using the option ROM. Using Expert Partition I am able to partition, format, and set the drive to a RAID 1 array. However, testing shows that if I pull the plug on one drive the other does have all the data accessible, but I get no notification that my RAID is degraded. When I plug the second drive back in, no notification that anything is being rebuilt. And if I am then foolish enough to pull the opposite drive, that’s the end of the RAID.
I would definitely prefer using RAID 1 for this but I absolutely need both notification if a drive dies, and the ability to rebuild the array after replacing the bad drive.
Is what I am trying to accomplish even possible with the current hardware? If not, would adding a RAID controller to the system allow me to do this? Any advice, or especially any links to clearly written how-to’s or tutorials would be greatly appreciated.
If all else fails I guess I’ll ditch the RAID entirely, and just use the second drive to automatically back up the first daily or something, but that is a last-resort solution in my mind.
Thanks much!