Re: RAID



Anders Karlsson wrote:
MD does that as well, I have such a setup. I would agree that if you
want to gamble your data on a RAID0 setup, *then* the fakeraid may be
your only option *if* you insist on striping across the whole disks
and not keep your root/boot partition separate from the RAID0.


3) Can boot from volume types other than raid1 ( i.e. raid0 )


See above.


No, md definately does not support directly booting from the raid. The bios and grub have no understanding of the md raid, they can only boot from a stand alone disk/partition. If md is mirroring, then both disks are the same, so the bios+grub can boot from one as if it were a stand alone disk. With raids other than raid1, this is not possible so you have to set up a seperate /boot that is either stand alone or mirrored.



4) In the event that the primary drive in a mirror fails, the system
still boots using the second drive rather than hang trying to read the
first.


That will hold true for MD as well. The whole point of mirroring is
that both (all) copies are equal, and contain the same data.


No, it won't because the bios only tries to boot the first disk as if it were not part of a mirror. If that fails, the system doesn't boot. The bios and grub can not fail over to the second disk on error automatically like the kernel md driver can, so in the event that something goes wrong on the first drive, you will have to unplug the first drive and use only the second drive in the mirror to boot.



Why oh why these fakeraid cards are incapable of 'hiding' the raid members they have attached, and present logical devices through int 13h instead like sane raid controllers is beyond me. I do regret not calling bull on the adapter I bought, and either spending less on a normal pic ide card, or spending more getting a proper raid card. Each one to their own I guess.


They ARE capable of presenting a single disk via int 13h, that is their entire point. That is what makes them hardware (fake)raid and is what allows them to be bootable. In windows you load a driver that also presents a single disk to the OS, but in linux the driver only shows the individual disks, and leaves the raiding up to the device mapper.



-- ubuntu-users mailing list ubuntu-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-users



Relevant Pages

  • No SATA disks appear on E7520 with 5.4-RELEASE
    ... I just got some SuperMicro 6014H-T servers in the door. ... The system comes with this funky Adaptec thing that does a "fake RAID" ... What I get is the system to boot the install disk, but no disks appear. ...
    (freebsd-stable)
  • Re: SBS 2003 wont boot
    ... disks in a RAID 5 config. ... and it wouldn't boot properly. ... Please click OK to shutdown this system and reboot into directory ...
    (microsoft.public.windows.server.sbs)
  • Re: SBS 2003 wont boot
    ... disks in a RAID 5 config. ... SBS Premium - SP1 applied. ... and it wouldn't boot properly. ...
    (microsoft.public.windows.server.sbs)
  • Re: Software RAID 0 and linux 2.6.8.1
    ... hardware RAID? ... card and am mirror two disks on which I have my Debian build. ... have dual boot, I'm positively using hardware not software RAID and I ... When a reboot fails because of a kernel change or whatever, ...
    (Debian-User)
  • Re: [SLE] is Raid 1 (mirror) so slow ?
    ... I want to use RAID 5 using 3 HD but this will cost me more. ... RAID 1 is actually faster when reading, because read requests can be satisfied from both disks. ... But you can do some tests for yourself, if you can set up a test system with mirroring: install bonnie++ and check the performance before and after mirroring. ...
    (SuSE)