setting up hardware RAID

I recently got the Sabrent SBT-RDIT Silicon Image 680, which was supposedly a RAID card, but searching this forum I have discovered that those cards aren't really RAID even though they say they are, and that you have to spend like 300$ for "true" RAID. Long story short, I'm not going to be buying a 300$ card. I want to know if I still can use hardware RAID?

I can set it up so it seems like the card is doing what it's supposed to be doing. I press F3 after POST and it brings up a menu I configure it, but when Linux loads the hard drives(2x seagate 160GB 8MB cache) and shown(fdisk -l) as just two normal disks as if the RAID setup is nonexistent. Am I just going to have to use software RAID? Or am I missing something?

I did configure my kernel with the the correct driver(I hope), I don't know if there's anything I might have missed. I did enable RAID support according to a few guides, but they were for software RAID not hardware. There seems to be a shortage of hardware RAID guides.

Long story short, I'm not going to be buying a 300$ card. I want to know if I still can use hardware RAID?

Then you have to steal one.

Linux can handle your s/w RAID with dmraid.

lol

OK, dmraid is giving a dependency issue, so I'm going to have to work that out over the weekend. But the s/w guides never mentioned that particular app. Like this one:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/linux/..._on_Slack_10_2

Shouldn't I use that one, since slackware is my distro? And dmraid seems to be a fedora thing, as I had to rpm2tgz the package.

Also, what would be the recommended file system? I'll probably do either 0 or linear and possibly 1(depending on my mood when I get around to this), and the file size will be mostly between 4-5MB to more than 1GB and sometimes a temporary 20GBish file. I'm a little unsure since I've never done any kind of RAID before. I'm definitely going to be doing some reading about this.

I have seen similar problems with Mandriva 2006 on an adaptec scsi raid card. I recently attended a short linux intro course to refresh some things, and it appears that WhiteBox Enterprise 4 (which is RedHat Enterprise 4, just rebranded) has pretty good raid support right out of the box, and during installation. Might be worth looking at, because I haven't heard anyone talking about a distro that could configure raid during setup... Though I'm not an expert and could be totally wrong.

dmraid is needed only if you need Windows compatibilty. Preferred is native Linux software RAID if this is the only OS in your box. With 20 GB files I'd use XFS or JFS maybe. EXT3 probably can do too with some special tuning.

How do I partition? All the guides I've read just seem to gloss over this part. I want two partitions, one that is 232GBytes and the other to fill out the drive.

I try:

mkfs.ext3 -b 4096 -E stride=16 /dev/md0p1

and it gives me:
mke2fs 1.38 (30-Jun-2005)
Could not stat /dev/md0p1 --- No such file or directory

The device apparently does not exist; did you specify it correctly?


If I do:

mkfs.ext3 -b 4096 -E stride=16 /dev/md0

It seems to work but I can't mount it and it doesn't make sense anyway because I have two partitions laid out with fdisk?


Here's fdisk -l:

Disk /dev/hde: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
2 heads, 4 sectors/track, 39072726 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 8 * 512 = 4096 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hde1 1 56843263 227373050 83 Linux
/dev/hde2 56843264 78145408 85208580 83 Linux

Disk /dev/hdf: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System

Disk /dev/md0: 320.0 GB, 320083591168 bytes
2 heads, 4 sectors/track, 78145408 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 8 * 512 = 4096 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/md0p1 1 56843263 227373050 83 Linux
/dev/md0p2 56843264 78145408 85208580 83 Linux


and cat /etc/raidtab:

raiddev /dev/md0
raid-level 0
nr-raid-disks 2
chunk-size 64
persistent-superblock 1
device /dev/hde
raid-disk 0
device /dev/hdf
raid-disk 1

Here is a guide with all steps explained: http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-...ickinstall.xml

OK, after much ado about nothing I've finally managed to install RAID successfully. Only problem it seems when I do:

hdparm -tT /dev/mapper/vg-drive

I get this error:
HDIO_DRIVE_CMD(null) (wait for flush complete) failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device

but when I hdparm /dev/md0 I don't get any errors. I tried reformatting with different options but still got the error. Putting it into a google search it sounds like it's a bug for which I can't do much about. Though all my other non-raid drives don't show that error.

This card has price of 300$? I got such card for 20$. Silicon Image chipset is not a really hardware raid card. I think it is just a IDE card with software raid drivers that make the raid.
I don't know but as i said i got this card for 20$.The true hardware raid cards are this from 3ware.

Originally Posted by Furlinastis OK, after much ado about nothing I've finally managed to install RAID successfully. Only problem it seems when I do: hdparm -tT /dev/mapper/vg-drive I get this error: HDIO_DRIVE_CMD(null) (wait for flush complete) failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device but when I hdparm /dev/md0 I don't get any errors. I tried reformatting with different options but still got the error. Putting it into a google search it sounds like it's a bug for which I can't do much about. Though all my other non-raid drives don't show that error.

hdparm only works on IDE hard disks. But here you are trying to test a logical volume.