Hello,
I have p5w dh deluxe motherboard and 2 fresh sata2 identical HDD’s …
My questions is how to build/enable raid 1 …
Do I just connect HDD’s to motherboard and set up something in bios, or I don’t have to touch bios and do some partitions … I’m complete ‘no clue’ when it comes down to raid 1 …
Is there an easy solution or should I just forget about it and move one with one disc …
Erik
Usually the way to set up a raid is by first going into the BIOS and enabling a RAID option.
After that you might gain a new option in the BIOS to assign disks to the RAID, but it could be that you have to do this in the raid configuration itself.
After enabling the RAID in the bios and having saved the changes you’ll see something new during the boot process, some line like ‘Press F10 to enter raid menu’ from there you should be able to pick the raid type and assign disks to it.
Quite sure the steps should be described in the manual
erik100 wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> I have p5w dh deluxe motherboard and 2 fresh sata2 identical HDD’s …
> My questions is how to build/enable raid 1 …
>
> Do I just connect HDD’s to motherboard and set up something in bios, or
> I don’t have to touch bios and do some partitions … I’m complete ‘no
> clue’ when it comes down to raid 1 …
> Is there an easy solution or should I just forget about it and move one
> with one disc …
>
> Erik
>
>
Or you could set up software RAID (that’s what I’ve done with a couple of
ordinary pata HDDs).
YaST is your friend.
email =~ s/nospam/fudokai/
Software raid…
The good:
Your motherboard dies on you… you can move onto the next one without having to buy the exact same motherboard or raid controller chip again.
The bad:
CPU is doing the work instead of chip made for the purpose.
Then again onboard raids are also known as ‘fake’ raids so I’ve no idea how much work they save the CPU from doing.
Personally I would strongly advise not using fake RAID.
It is software RAID, just one that’s done at driver level. The Linux RAID is flexible enough to let you mirror some partitions, and stripe some others for a good performance boost. 2 disk arms, really help, random read/write as well as sequential throughput.
You can use the YaST Partioning tool to setup RAID. In 11.1-RC1 it wanted 2 disk partitions, rather than building the RAID 1 device in degraded mode from a partition with data, followed by silvering the other mirror; enough to prevent me for trying it out, as I couldn’t spare space until after the install was good.
To me, the issues with non-standard data formats, make it hard to be persuaded that a budget controller chip, on a Mobo is going to offload enough CPU or have other benefits to make up for loss of flexibility.
Hardware RAID controllers offer battery backed RAM buffer cache, hot swap disk caddies, and a real embedded CPU controller.
If someone has some good info on these chipsets, I’d be quite interested. Also I wonder about manageability and how it’s going to report errors on a mirror, when it’s degraded.