Hi, ive been trying to install Fedora, Suse, FreeBSD on my Raid 0 Raptor Array, but i cant get it to pick up 1 drive instead of 2... i htink this is the sata driver... can anyone tell me any distro that supports sata raid or how to get one of the 3 distro's working

Cheers

N4N01D

its not really a matter of the distro, its more of the kernel. AFAIK, the 2.6 kernels support sata raid. but, if you dont feel like compiling, the latest versions of distros (like mandrake 10) should have 2.6 kernels.

Also consider the fact that many SATA "RAID" controllers aren't true hardware RAID controllers but the actual RAIDing takes place in software. Gentoo supports most chips when booted with "doataraid".


Håkan

I've been doing alot of research on support for these SATA RAID chipsets. Problem is, most these chipsets actually use Software RAID, not Hardware RAID.

If the system was truely hardware RAID, it would present a single disk to your OS, regardless of the OS.

Any RAID setup that requires a software driver to work is actually oftware RAID, not hardware RAID.

Linux does have drivers for some RAID chipsets, but instead of trying to get some unsupported, propietary driver to work with your system, you may be better off with the MD driver, which is open-source and well supported.

Here is another excellent summary:

http://www.linuxmafia.com/faq/Hardware/sata.html

cheers people, i wasnt sure where to look to find out more

Ah, also, if you really just want RAID0 to combine two disks so they look like one, you also may want to look at Logical Volume Management, which apparently is much more flexible then RAID0.

You can resize partitions much more simply, and it is recommended alot at various LUGs.

I've just been searching the web for info on thus subject as well. An besides the linuxmafia info page i found this thread. But now I'm a bit confused.

The thing is I'd like to set up a sata raid (for performance reasons) and have yet to decide what motherboard/chipset/card to get.

As i see it most chipsets aren't true hardware raids anyway. But the linuxmafia site says that the 3Ware Escalade *is* a Hardware RAID chip so actually this one should present a single disk to any OS. But at the top the page states that the 3Ware Escalade has been supported pretty early.... I thought it didn't *have* to be supported?!

So is there any advice on what to get (chipset/actual product) and what to consider software-wise (system will be kernel 2.6 and debian-based).

Thanks for any info!