I've had no luck so far finding a RAID utility for a 770 chipset board I'm using for a Mythbuntu box. I plan on running x64 Mythbuntu 9.04, using a DViCO FusionHDTV7 tuner, two 750GB Seagates in RAID 0 (want to avoid dropped frames) supported with a 2.1GHz dual core AM2 CPU and four 1GB DDR 800 sticks. I have a Radeon HD4850 card with HDMI. I plan to plug the video directly to the TV and use Toslink to hook the on board sound to the AV reveiver. Books are ordered up. I figure I have some studies ahead. But I didn't think finding a RAID driver would be so fruitless. Any links, etc. appreciated. Thanks!

Hi.

Welcome (neighbor) to LQ.

If no one more knowledgeable chimes in, we can start a conversation on this.

I poked around a bit looking for some details on the AMD 770 chipset. Is this the kind of RAID described at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fakerai...ver-based_RAID ?

cheers, makyo

AMD was no help. I'm still waiting for Gigabyte to respond to my inquiries. I've seen some things about RAID utilities in some distros of Linux and I crossing my fingers that Mythbunu has such an animal when I finally have all the pieces together, configure the bios for RAID 0 and drop in the Mythbunu CD I burned. But if someone knows of a stand-alone RAID utility for Ubuntu or Debian Linux in general it'd be a big time saver to have that disc at the ready when I try to get this thing up and running.

Yes, that's what is on the mobo I'm using - a Gigabyte GA-MA770-DS3P. A dedicated hardware RAID controller that I know of runs on SuSE and Red Hat (and I assume Ubuntu/Mythbuntu too - maybe with some tweeking) is about $140. That's almost twice what the motherboard was. Hardware controllers are spendy and I'd rather not have to travel that road.

Hi.

I agree that hardware RAID is expensive (and somewhat inflexible). Those are some reasons why I use software RAID. I have used Linux software RAID with RHEL a few years ago on a number of SunFire servers (Opteron version). Currently I use Debian 5 ("lenny") software RAID on a server (VMWare Server 2 virtual machine host and guests) Intel Xeon, and a companion workstation AMD Athlon. Both of those are 64-bit and use SATA disks, both have fake RAID, and in the Intel I turned the fake RAID off in the BIOS settings (I haven't needed additional SATA disks for the workstation yet, so I'm using the standard controllers). I have also used software RAID on 2 SCSI disks in an older IBM NetVista with SuSE 9. (As an experiment, I recently used Debian to build a number of RAID configurations, culminating in a a very interesting RAID10 array with 4 SCSI disks on an AMD dual-CPU Athlon -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-sta...nux_MD_RAID_10 )

The software is already available on the install CD / DVD media. The install took me a few attempts before I got what I wanted (I always allocate time for a number of installs, so that I get used to the choices and steps).

With Debian (either 32-bit or 64-bit), you use manual partitioning. Assuming you have deactivated the fake RAID, the install can proceed more or less normally. You partition each physical device first, then you assemble the array(s) from those partitions. It's slightly more complicated if you want to involve LVM. I have done that only with RHEL, and not Debian. There is a HOWTO at http://www.howtoforge.com/set-up-a-f...id1-lvm-system that includes encryption. There are other topics at howtoforge that might be useful.

I'm assuming that you know that if you lose any disk in a RAID0 set, you will lose everything. I used RAID0 for speed once for a very short project, but I did, in fact, lose some work because of a bad disk. I might be tempted to use RAID0 again, but never for the OS itself or home directories.

On the other hand, the flexibility of software RAID allowed me to use 2 SATA and an IDE in an array.

Best wishes ... cheers, makyo

( Edit 1: typo )

For anyone else looking for what I was, I found some useful info on this link:
http://forums.amd.com/forum/messagev...threadid=96233

There's a lot of AMD SB700 boards out there, so this might be helpful to any of you out there looking to use RAID for you Linux box.