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Old 05-19-2011, 03:43 PM   #1
rnturn
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Gigabyte 965P-S3 M'board and SATA RAID question


I have a system with a Gigabyte 965P-S3 motherboard that is currently booting from a set of SCSI drives connected through a controller on the PCI bus. What I would like to do is use a boot device connected through one of the two SATA chips (one Intel, one Gigabyte) on the motherboard. The Gigabyte SATA controller can, apparently, be used to configure RAIDsets. The manual goes through the process of how you would create a raidset and it seems pretty straightforward. Then... you need to grab a device driver off the accompanying CD and put it on a floppy for your Windows system. BZZZZZ! No good. I am running SUSE (soon to be the latest OpenSUSE) on this system.

I read somewhere (perhaps on LQ) that the Gigabyte SATA crontroller was JMicron-based. And... I noticed on the JMicron site that Linux is able to access the RAID device using "dmraid" and that "grub" supports the JMicron. Their site doesn't, unfortunately, come right out and say that you can boot from a RAID1 device managed by the JMicron/Gigabyte controller.

Has anyone used raidsets created via the Gigabyte SATA controller with Linux and booted from them?

Any hints-n-kinks to pass along?

TIA...

--
Rick
 
Old 05-20-2011, 06:23 AM   #2
cascade9
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I havent checked the exact model jmicron controller used in the Gigabyte 965P-S3, but generally jmicron is not that great. I know I've seen reviews using windows where the jmicron controllers were a lot slower than better controllers.

The only reason I could think of to use teh jmicron controller is because you are out of intel ICH8 SATAII ports. Even in that case, I'd use the intel ICH8 controller for any RAIDing you might want to do and put single drives, optical drives, etc. on the jmicron controller.

Last edited by cascade9; 05-21-2011 at 09:29 AM. Reason: typo
 
Old 05-20-2011, 08:51 AM   #3
rnturn
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Quote:
The only reason I could think of to use teh jmicron controller is because you are out of intel ICH8 SATAII ports. Even in that case, I'd use the intel ICH8 controller for any RAIDing you might want to do and put single drives, optical drives, etc. on the jmicron controller.
The reason I am considering the JMicron controller is that Gigabyte has a RAID configuration utility that -- unless I'm reading the manual wrong -- only works with the JMicron-controller SATA drives; not drives on the Intel controller ports.

My goal is to get a reliable boot device, not necessarily blazing fast performance. My experience with the mass-market SATA drives is that their lifetimes are not all that great. At least not compared to the old SCSI drives I have been using. (I have one system that's been running a SCSI disk that was built in the early '90s, been running nearly continuously since it was built, and only now is it beginning to develop bad blocks.)

As far as software RAID goes... I eventually be moving all the data on the non-OS disks onto software RAID disks but won't be able -- as far as I can tell -- be able to boot from such a disk. I am willing to be proven wrong, though. Got a useful URL for how to do such a boot disk with OpenSUSE?

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Old 05-20-2011, 12:38 PM   #4
masterclassic
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Is this your motherboard?
I don't see anything about marvell disk controller (there is only marvell LAN controller).
I understand that the motherboard comes with 'Intel ICH8' and a 'Gigabyte SATAII' controller that is supposed to provide RAID configuration. I don't know anything about performance for this Gigabyte controller.

I thought that ICH8 is a RAID controller too, as my own motherboard (Asus P5B deluxe wifi) uses it, along with a second ATA/SATA RAID chip (marvell). Both controllers support RAID.

However, I didn't find anything about RAID on intel for GA-965P-S3.
 
Old 05-20-2011, 04:17 PM   #5
rnturn
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Quote:
I don't see anything about marvell disk controller (there is only marvell LAN controller).
Well, the manual sez (and the spelling error isn't mine :^D ):
Code:
Storage  ICH8 Southbrigde
            - 1 FDD connector, allowing connection of 1 FDD device
            - 4 SATA 3Gb/s connectors (SATAII0,1, 2, 3), allowing
              connection of 4 SATA 3Gb/s devices

         Onboard GIGABYTE SATA2 chip
            - 1 IDE connector (UDMA 33/ATA 66/ATA 100/ATA 133),
              allowing connection of 2 IDE devices
            - 2 SATA 3Gb/s connectors (GSATAII0,1), allowing
              connection of 2 SATA 3Gb/s devices
            - Supports RAID 0, RAID 1, and JBOD for Serial ATA
No mention of any RAID capability for the Intel SATA controller chip.

There is a Marvell 10/100/1000 LAN controller chip which seems to work nicely at 1000Mb/s (despite what I had read on some sites) but I have never seen any mention of any other Marvell components.

I have since found that motherboard RAID devices are generally recognized by later Linuxes so I might chance trying to build one of these and seeing if I can get Linux to install on it. The bummer is that the system I'd be doing this on hosts our email and web services. Since my daughters have a couple of web-based school projects sitting out there at the moment, I will likely need to wait a few weeks until the school year is over.
 
Old 05-20-2011, 04:36 PM   #6
phil.d.g
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Is there a particular reason why you want to use 'FakeRAID'?

There are 3 types of RAID implementations, hardware RAID, BIOS/Firmware level RAID, and software RAID.

hardware RAID is typically found on server grade kit only and is quite expensive. You're talking about BIOS/Firmware RAID, affectionately called FakeRAID, and then there is software RAID.

So, FakeRAID works by passing off the work to the CPU by means of a driver, I'm not sure if you can take two drives using FakeRAID and move them to another controller/motherboard.

Software RAID (mdadm) is completely done in software, you can use plain ordinary sATA controllers, it's reliable, fast and has minimal overhead from my experience, plus there are many more options available than the usual FakeRAID system. Furthermore, you can move the RAID to another computer should you need.

I would use the ICH8 sATA ports and mdadm.
 
Old 05-21-2011, 09:29 AM   #7
cascade9
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@ phil.d.g- nice explaination.

@ masterclassic-

Quote:
On the storage side, this motherboard has a total of six SATA-300 ports, four provided by the south bridge (ICH8) and two provided by a ”Gigabyte SATA2“ chip, which is a relabeled JMicron JMB363 chip (see Figure 3).The ports controlled by the chipset do not support RAID, as the south bridge used is ICH8 and not ICH8R, however the two ports controlled by the JMicron chip supports RAID0, RAID1 and JBOD.
http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/artic...ard-Review/406

ICH8 wont do FakeRAID. For that you would need ICH8R ('R'AID)

@ rnturn- with you saying RAID1 I didnt think you were after performance. Even then the jmicron controller is pure junk.

Just one example here-

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=313610

I wouldnt be suprised if gigabyte rebranded the jmicron chip because they are very badly regarded. IMO you would be better off using software RAID on the intel controller, not fakeRAID on the jmicron chip. RAIDing from the jmicron chip would be slower and less flexable overall than software RAID.
 
Old 05-22-2011, 02:15 PM   #8
rnturn
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Quote:
Originally Posted by phil.d.g View Post
Is there a particular reason why you want to use 'FakeRAID'?
In part because the SUSE installer for the version that is running on the system didn't seem to offer an "install and boot from RAID" option. (Which I was not happy to see since I thought I'd seen that available on some much older Red Hat versions.) I do have plans to get that system running OpenSUSE 11.4 soon.

I have yet to get any good information as to whether Linux even recognizes the m'board RAID device as a valid boot device. If it doesn't then it doesn't matter and I should start looking for a good RAID controller card. Or a really good HOWTO for booting OpenSUSE using a RAID 1 device. I did just run across a document on the outdated OpenSUSE site -- they're, apparently, going through a site update -- but haven't had a chance to read through it yet to see if it's applicable to my situation. (I.e.: Does my older version work? Will I need to upgrade the OS at the same time I'm implementing this? How many of my applications are then going to have to be updated to work properly if I need the OS upgrade? Ugh!)

Quote:
Furthermore, you can move the RAID to another computer should you need.
Heh, I'll believe that when I see it done. I've had the "interesting" experience of pulling a SCSI controller, cable, and all the disks that were attached to it from one system and moved the whole shebang to another system and the OS wouldn't properly install on the disks until they had all been [re-]low-level formatted.
 
Old 05-22-2011, 06:28 PM   #9
phil.d.g
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You seem to be missing my main point:

There is no special hardware required for mdadm, it is entirely implemented in software. Turn your BIOS RAID off and ignore that.

It sounds like your interesting experience was with a hardware RAID controller, again this won't happen with mdadm, all you need is /etc/mdadm.conf

I'll give the openSUSE installer a whirl tonight, I can't imagine that it wouldn't support mdadm during install.
 
Old 05-23-2011, 12:04 AM   #10
phil.d.g
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So it turns out that the OpenSUSE installer _does_ support creating and installing to mdadm devices:

Instructions:
* During the install, at the Preparing Hard Disk setup choose "Custom Partitioning (for experts)"
* Select your first drive from the left hand tree and choose the partitions tab
* Now mdadm works on a partition level, not the drive level, so create a partition for swap, choose do not format and set the file system id to 0xFD Linux RAID. Also choose not to mount the partition
* Do the same for your second drive. And then repeat for your other partitions. I decided to create a partition for swap - 2GB and another for / - the rest of the drive
* Now go to RAID on the left hand tree
* click add RAID, choose the RAID level and move the partitions for swap over to selected devices. Leave the default RAID options, and follow the process to set up the filesystem and mount point. Do this for /, and any other partitions you created.
* Continue the install process as per usual.
 
Old 05-27-2011, 08:34 PM   #11
rnturn
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Quote:
Originally Posted by phil.d.g View Post
So it turns out that the OpenSUSE installer _does_ support creating and installing to mdadm devices:

Instructions:
* During the install, at the Preparing Hard Disk setup choose "Custom Partitioning (for experts)"
* Select your first drive from the left hand tree and choose the partitions tab
* Now mdadm works on a partition level, not the drive level, so create a partition for swap, choose do not format and set the file system id to 0xFD Linux RAID. Also choose not to mount the partition

[snip]
That's pretty much what the HOWTO that I found says to do. I'm pretty familiar with the "Custom Partitioning" menu as I use it for most all my installs. I'll see what happens when I try the procedure using an older SCSI controller and a couple of 36GB/10K drives. (No SATA drives just laying around.) With a little luck I can get a recent SUSE distribution to boot from the DVD drive in my (older Compaq) test system and try the process out. I'm not sure the partition-level RAID is such a good idea. It makes it possible for someone to make some really bad decisions about where they place partitions. (Yeah, it's under the "expert" partitioning option but that shouldn't let you do stupid things just because it's for "experts".)

I'd feel better about using RAID if it mirrored entire drives since that is the way you'll normally deal with a failure (replacing the entire disk). Rebuilding a partition-based RAID may let you quickly recover from a bad block that corrupts a partition involved in a raidset by using some unused space on another disk (Unused space... Hah! What's that? [grin] ) but eventually you're going to have to replace the spindle so why put it off. I guess if I want that kind of RAID, I'm going to have to cough up the $$$ for a controller card.


Re: the "interesting" SCSI problem... No, it wasn't a SCSI RAID controller. Just a garden variety Adaptec (2940 if memory serves).
 
  


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