Hello,

Recenlty i suffered from a harddisk failure on my desktop machine, luckily this was a secondary disk so i didn't loose any really important data, however it scared me pretty much since it was my first harddisk failure ever and it made me realize how fragile the data on my harddisk really is.

So last week i ordered two new SATA diskdrives which i plan to be using in a RAID 1 setup. Today i got the disks in and plugged everything in the motherboard(ASUS P4PE motherbord), next i defined and build a new RAID 1 array in the controllers(PROMISE fasttrak onboard) BIOS. I downloaded the newest stable release of DEBIAN linux.

Now i was ready to install. I put in the cd and booted the debian installer everything went find until I came to the part for partioning the harddisk, I say here that the installer found two physical discs rather then one virtual disk representing the RAID array(this is what i expected). I was now able to partition the two discs individualy(if the two discs where a mirror this can not be possible right?). So to me it seams that altought the discs are detect correclty the RAID array is pretty much ignored.

The first question I have is thus; Is there some way to make the installer threat/reconize the two disc as one physical volume(Which I belief is inherent to having a RAID array, but maybe im wrong in this belief)?

The second question is about software RAID. When I noticed that the RAID array mentioned above isn't reconized by the Debian installer I thought about deleting the RAID array from the controller BIOS and just go with software RAID, no I can still do this but i rather would use the hardwarer solution since i payed for it anyway(Im guessing here that hardware RAID is more efficient then software). However I was thinking that it might be nice to go with software RAID anyway since it might be more migrateable, with that I mean I can transfer to two discs to another controller and still keep the data intact.

This brings me to the second question; Is it indeed true that software RAID is completely independend with respect to the RAID controler being used.

Thanks in advance for anyone taking the time and trouble to read my post and maybe answer some of the questions i asked.

Greetings,
Vasco

Interesting .. limited knowledge on my end ... :

Software RAID Ive often heard can be faster than Hardware RAID but there will be special threads around here somewhere .. .

Id guess - yes - that software RAID is independant from the RAID contoller - or doesnt need it at all - software RAID then doesnt need a RAID controller - any disks will do - I have heard .