Fedra Core 2 and Hardware Raid 5
 

Hi all,
Newbie to this Linux lark. I am trying to install Fedora Core two onto a HighPoint RocketRAID 454 controller. It is not liking it, I have created the container in the Controller BIOS and all is fine there. When I go t install on the container it is all seen as separate disks. I can create a software raid in this but I am really more into getting the hardware raid up and running like when I had 2000 server running.... Any body any ideas about where to even start ????


Any help at all would be really cool


Cheers,
John :newbie:

OK so the silence is deafening on that one then. Hows about this one, the software raid in Linux is it any good ?

Ok...

In order for the raid to show up like you want it to in Linux, you're gonna need a driver for the RocketRAID. This "hardware" raid controller is not really hardware raid. A special device driver is needed from the manufacurer to get the operating system to recognize the raid. Why doesn't Fedora include the driver? Because most of the time the drivers are closed-source. Fedora (or any other Linux distro) is not going to include any closed-source code in the distribution.

Check with HighPoint to see if they have a raid driver for Linux...if they don't your only option is to use the Linux software Raid...which should work fine.

and to answer your question, software raid is very near to just as good as hardware.

In some ways software raid is better than hardware raid. If your raid controller dies 5 years down the road you've got a good chance that that model would not be supported any more and you'd probably have to rebuild your raid from backups. With software raid, you'd only have to insure that you had the same software running to recover from inconvenient hardware failures, since the data is not masaged by the hardware beyond what any old disk controller would do.

You do have to suffer with taking up cpu cycles to calculate the parity blocks though. I defer to those that have done it on how big a deal that is...

-Ben

Hey thanks for that. I am a newbie to this game so I guess for the time being software raid is as good as anywhere to start. Does Fedora come with an integrated back up utility ? On the windows scheme I used to run back ups to an external USB hard disk. Any idea on A) how i get the back up utility to run and b) how to get the USB disk seen by the OS ?


Cheers