Fedora 8 on Intel S3000AH Motherboard
 

Hi All,
I just assembled a server to work as a File server. I added 3 SATA HDDs in this system. I configured two logical drives as follows using Intel Embedded RAID (LSI MegaRaid):
1. Single 80GB HDD in RAID-0 mode (HDD attached to SATA port-0)
2. Two 400GB HDDs in RAID-1 mode (Disks on SATA ports 2 and 3)

When I try to install FC8 on this system, the FC8 sees all 3 disks as sda, sdb and sdc. I expect to see only two disks as the hardware RAID should present each logical disk as separate disk to OS.

Can someone help me in this. The help pages on Intel and LSI webpages show the drivers and insructions of RHEL3 and RHEL4.

Does anyone have experience with FC8 on this mother board with Hardware RAID enabled?

thanks and regards,
Ravi

I am sorry to report that you are bound to be disappointed. It seems from my searches on the Web that the Intel ICH7R chipset that provides "RAID support" on your board is, in fact, FakeRAID, and will be of little or no use to you when running a Linux OS. Intel itself notes on its website that, for 2.6 kernels, the functionality is provided by dmraid. Here is the link: http://www.intel.com/support/chipset.../CS-020663.htm.

Fortunately, the all-software RAID support in 2.6 kernels is pretty robust, and should handle your situation straightaway. I have recently been down this path with another chipset that claimed RAID support, and that is where I ended up.

Setting up RAID is described in the Fedora Installation docs, in the chapter on Disk Druid. I ended up defining a separate RAID set for each partition, although I have read recently that you can arrange things to handle several partitions using LVM to aggregate them onto a single RAID set.

Parenthetically, I don't understand how you are going to get any satisfaction out of using a single spindle ("in RAID-0 mode"). RAID-0 is supposed to stripe data onto two or more drives; even if you partition the 80GB device into two logical drives, you will still have a single point of failure, and there will be no speed advantage, because the data will still all have to be written to the single drive. In fact, there might well be a slow-down, because of the need to move the heads a considerable distance to switch between the two partitions for every write or read.

Thanks for the reply. I was thinking that this board uses LSI's megaraid chip which is a hardware RAID.

Regarding RAID-0 on single disk, this is how the RAID BIOS shows single disk when configured as a logical disk array.

Now I am planning to disable RAID in the BIOS and use Linux software RAID to create a RAID-1 array from sdb and sdc of 400GB.

regards,
Ravi