Asus A7N8X Deluxe 2.0 and SATA RAID on RedHat Linux 9?

From: Angela Kahealani (angela_at_kahealani.com)
Date: 06/08/04 

Date: Mon, 07 Jun 2004 20:22:36 -1000

I have an Asus A7N8X Deluxe 2.0 and I have 2 SeaGate 120 SATA drives
connected to the motherboard. I DON'T BOTHER TO setup a hardware RAID.
When I boot from the Redhat Install and use Disk Druid to
manually partition the drives, I'm starting with the raw
/dev/hde and /dev/hdg. I recommend using the installer disk's Disk Druid
to manually partition. Choose /dev/hde as the most probable boot
default disk coming out of BIOS, and write the boot blocks to the
Master Boot Record of /dev/hde, and make the first partition on
/dev/hde be about 128MegaBytes allocated to mount point /boot. Make the
second partition on /dev/hde be swap space. Make the first partition on
/dev/hdg be a swap space that's 128MegaBytes larger than the swap space
on /dev/hde. So:
/dev/hde1 0128MB /boot
/dev/hde2 0896MB swap
/dev/hdg1 1024MB swap
now the disk addresses are aligned for allocation of subsequent
partitions in matched size pairs for RAID allocations. I recommend that
if your size exceeds 137GB you must fragment into more partitions. In
my case with a pair of 120GB disks, gouging out 1GB from each disk for
/boot and swap partitions still leaves 119GB per disk. I decided to
split that evenly into 2 (more) partitions per disk (staying within the
4 primary partitions) of just under 60GB each. The first pair of
partitions matched between the pair of drives was allocated to
/dev/md1 60GB / in a RAID 1 (Mirrored) configuration
and the last pair of partitions from the two drives was allocated to
/dev/md0 110GB /home in a RAID 0 (Striped) configuration

So, the system itself is mirrored for hot backup no downtime operation.
The user data on /home is striped for speed, like edit space for video
and other high bandwidth data streams. User data gets backed-up in non
RAID fashion... via ethernet to a fileserver and via burning DVDs or
DVD-RAMs.

try:
apropos RAID
for the md tools to assemble a RAID from partitions

> Is there much difference between a software and a hardware RAID with
> SATA drives on a Nvidia Nforce chip set and a 2400+ AMD CPU?

Yes... the "hardware" RAID controller appearantly is driven under some
versions of MicroSoft's WinDOwS, the only place you'll be able to clock
it. I wouldn't allow my disks to ever be tainted with MicroSoftware, so
I just use software RAID built into Linux Kernel.

> Has anybody successfully setup a hardware RAID1 on this motherboard in
> Fedora Linux Core 1?

...none I've ever seen, and have been watching for over a year.

> Thank you, Brian

There appears to be some combination of early BIOSes, early chips and
motherboards, and early linux drivers, that resulted in RAID based data
corruption. The hardware RAID is known for that. I've experienced
flakey operation when combining partitions via RAID into volumes that
cross that nasty 137GB disk block addressing limit. By keeping all
partitions and their combinations to addressing ranges below the 127GB
limit, it seems stable. The addressing-range limit imposition of
partition size limits thus forces multitude of partitions, which then
led to the realization of the ability to do both RAID-0 and RAID-1 with
the same hardware disks shows a flexibility provided by Linux.
So, you get the choice:
do you want this stored and retrieved
with certainty? or
with speed?
Striped UserSpace! Of Course!
Mirrored System! Of Course!
Built on ext3 filesystem! Of Course!

oooohhhh.... then it can reboot quickly?
yes.... oooohhhh....
but the load on the system to rebuild the mirror keeps it busy for a
while after a crash recovery...
but it does that automatically and after getting online quickly due to
the fast disk check with the journalled filesystem?
yes...
ooooohhhhhh.....

you say this OS has been well tested on servers?
duh!

Aloha, Angela 

-- 
Copyright 2004 Angela Kahealani. All rights reserved without prejudice;
UCC1-207. All information and transactions are non negotiable and are
private between the parties. http://www.kahealani.com/

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