I have spent about a week reading up on it and experimenting with install options and have read up on using software raid as well as hardware raid.

This is what I want to do, have an e-mail server and NAS, so data protection is an ultimate must. I have good write-ups using Ubuntu so I will be using the latest version of Ubuntu server to accomplish this.

The main reason I am posting this thread is to find out exactly how to go about creating a software RAID that will work for what I want. I understand I have to use a RAID 1 to boot from and then somehow I have to use mdadm to create a RAID 5 array or a RAID 10 array. I will be using 3 or 4 500GB SATA hard drives.

I don't have the links in front of me but everything I have followed has not worked so far. I thought that you could boot from a RAID 1 array and then start working on making other partitions RAID 5 or RAID 10 (although they would never be bootable).

I apologize, I know this has been asked a hundred times before but I have not been able to follow a good solution. My motherboard allows for hardware raid but I have disabled it as it just causes problems during install.

Any help any of you can give me on doing this is much appreciated.

That would probably be fake raid on a motherboard. You don't *have* to use it, but it should work. Have you looked at the FakeRaidHowto on the Ubuntu forum? (google fakeraidhowto ought to pull it up) If you follow that (or have) and it doesn't work please post the details of the errors as you encounter them, along with the mobo specs.

If you want to use RAID 1 with mdadm and grub, please post what you tried and I'm sure there will be plenty of people who'll cheerfully point out how to fix it.

I remember way back that I could not setup LVM or RAID on Ubuntu 6.06. That's why I'm still using grandpa Debian. I don't know if that's the same case now. But I heard other complain about LVM and RAID on the Ubundu Desktop setup (don't know about the server). I guess the Ubuntu logic was to use hardware RAID which most makes people feel safer in production environments.

You should be able to setup RAID at the install level. I know you could do it in Debian. I would not trust any distro that does not do that (I don't care how popular).

The hardware RAID that comes with most cheap computers today is not a full-blown solution - it still requires "Windows" drivers. So those ideas will not work with the Linux kernel. You did well in turning them off.

No, not at all, you can use dmraid and get perfectly good support.

From what I've heard dm-raid is not supported by most installers. Also you'll have problems if you swap your drives to another motherboard that does not have the same RAID chip. You have to go totally out of your way to make it work on a boot partition. So why bother, user mdadm instead. Also there is no difference between these fakeraid chips and using the software raid built into the Linux kernel - the CPU still has to do all the work either way.

thank you so much for the replies. I have started looking deeper into raid controllers but will do what has been suggested here before I move forward.

cognizance: you're welcome, good luck

ramram29: The OP's using Ubuntu, which has excellent dmraid support currently. You are right in that there is no inherent advantage in speed. The pros and cons of dmraid have been discussed extensively elsewhere.

Creating raid 5 on 3 disks using cli:

mdadm -C /dev/md0 -a yes -l 5 -n 3

and see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

so, old motherboard died. new one is in the mail.

going to go ahead and do raid 1+0

Thanks again for all of your help, will update the thread with issues I run into, if any.