Hi folks,

Does anyone have any experience / advice with SATA RAID on Dell Precision T7920 (possibly also T5820 ad T7820)?

It appears the only built-in (SATA) RAID is some horrible Intel RST firmware / software type RAID - also called "VROC" (virtual raid over CPU)? When I configure a basic RAID0 (on two SATA 7200 drives) in the BIOS, I boot into Slackware from a different disk or setup stick, and all I see are the two normal drives (not-RAIDed).

My assumption is even if I got this working, performance would be limited and CPU intensive? I don't even know what software / distro / kernel are required to "see" this type of RAID? Seems like Slackware just ignores it... but I don't really understand the point of it.

Is it worth getting a PCIe card hardware controller and trying to hook it all up? This page https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/e...lers_available seems to suggest a number of options but the cabling seems annoying, particularly since the machine comes with a bunch of integrated hot-swap disk bays already wired in.

Thanks

I would use software raid. The CPU load is negligible, at least with RAID 0 and 1.

The problem with hardware RAID controllers is that they also fail sometimes. I had this happen, years ago, and finding the exact same RAID controller wasn't so easy. With software RAID, you can just move the disks to a new server.

Ok, thanks. Do you know if the onboard Intel "VROC" RAID, or whatever it is, makes any difference? I.e. even without it, presumably I can just setup a software raid in the OS, using any available disks?

If you are setting up a new software RAID there is no sense in going with vendor-specific option. Set up a plain md RAID (man mdadm) - it is platform-agnostic, better supported and as far as CPU usage is concerned makes no difference.