Help: Access to SATA hardware RAID?
 

Just received a new server from a supplier. It has a 3Ware 8506 SATA RAID with 10 disks (one is a hot spare). Suse Enterprise server 8 came preinstalled (I am more familiar with RH9.0).

Apparently I can see the RAID system under /proc/scsi/3w-xxxx/1 so I suppose it is /dev/sda1?
Using cat /proc/scsi/scsi I can find it under scsi1 channel 00 ID 00 Lun 00 Vendor 3Ware.

What should I do to be able to mount this array? mkfs what filesystem? There is supposed to be one large 2TB partition.

The system boots from a separate 36GB HD, nto connected to the RAID controller. System boots up fine.


Thanks,

Dirk

Yeah, depending on the RAID configuration of the card, its all reported on to the kernel as one big scsi drive, check:

dmesg | grep sd

You'll see the block size and the scsi device scan. Hopefully its already partitioned. I would recommend XFS or Reiser, ext3 gets grumpy spread over that large a space, not to mention its starts to hog too much disk for fs infrastructure.

Cheers,

Finegan

I found out the RAID was not partitioned, so after running fdisk on it and then mkfs I was able to mount it without any problem.

Interesting that you recommend Reiser for large partitions, I can still repartition and reformat because there is nothing on the disk yet.

Thanks

Dirk

Really I recommend XFS, we've got a couple backup machines here at work with arrays in the Tb range and Reiser 4 is going to be relentless, but until then... well, XFS is a decade old and can handle a single file that is 9Eb, yeah... Tera, Peta, Exo... Really I'll probably keep using XFS in the future anyway.

Cheers,

Finegan