So I installed a S-ATA RAID PCI controller I purchased from Newegg.com for like $20 bucks which seems pretty simple. I installed it and then threw on my 2 Seagate 500GB S-ATA drives.

When my machine POST's, I can see the Silicon Image RAID controller on the card being loaded and I was able to create a RAID1 array on the controller using the 2 identical drives I added but then when it came to installing the OS, I was not sure if it saw or detected the drives separately or how that worked. Regardless, I processed through the Debian install and installed on what appeared to be /dev/sda1. I would assume that I should not install on /dev/sdb1 since that was the mirrored drive or at least going to be the mirrored drive.

Now when I am in my Gnome OS and everything is working, I am not sure if Linux just thinks I have 2 drives as primary and slave or if it knows that I have a RAID hardware controller in place.

When I check my disk manager in Gnome, I can see that my /dev/sdb1 is not formatted nor is there or appear to be any data written to the disk. I think this is bad as RAID 1 is not being applied for whatever reason.

Here is what I see:

1 - /dev/scd0
2 - /dev/sda1
3 - /dev/sdb1

Now /dev/scd0 has no partition info but I would assume this is my RAID 1 array.

The /dev/sda1 and /dev/sdb1 both have mount points but obviously sbd1 is not formatted.

What do you guys think? Is RAID1 working on my box or is there any way to test or verify if the info I have provided is not sufficient?

A RAID controller should be doing hardware RAID meaning that by the time the OS (software) saw the disk it should appear to be a single disk. If you're seeing two disks in the OS it sounds as if it doesn't recognize your RAID setup.

I've not done it on SATA but in a recent thread Quakeboy2 put a link indicating there may be issues with SATA RAID controllers for Linux:

http://linux-ata.org/faq-sata-raid.html

Here's the bad news: If it's a $20 card, then it's not a hardware RAID. I believe that paragraph 8 in http://linux-ata.org/faq-sata-raid.html will answer the OPs question of how to add an ATARAID to a running system. Unfortunately, it's not clear how to install to an ATARAID RAID1 boot disk set from those instructions, and I've never tried it, so I can't help.

So basically from everyones perspective, everyone agrees that RAID is not working then on my system, right...?

Basically you have no RAID unless you use software RAID. Kernel RAID for Linux-only box, dmraid for dual-boot.

What about the expensive 3ware 9560SE RAID SATA controller?

Hi.

This may have some information of interest:
http://linux-ata.org/faq-sata-raid.html
as well as:
http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/238
which is on sarge.

I just installed software RAID1 for both /boot and / (the latter with LVM) on a few servers, but with RHEL4/U4 manual partition with Disk Druid. When I get a chance, I plan to try the same thing with Debian. I tested the RHEL install by removing the drives one at a time (Sun Fire servers, drives in carriers making replacement easy and quick), and it worked very well.

Keep us posted on how it goes for you ... cheers, makyo

3ware does hardware RAID controllers, they work well in Linux. Your controller is simply a HDD controller which can instruct Windows to load software RAID.

Back to the original question: "So I installed a S-ATA RAID PCI controller I purchased from Newegg.com for like $20 bucks which seems pretty simple. I installed it and then threw on my 2 Seagate 500GB S-ATA drives."

If you don't plan to have any Microsoft OS on this, then I can help you along with installing software RAID. I did this recently with a Debian RAID0 installation, so RAID1 should be similar.

During the install process, where you partition the drives, set the main partition to Software Raid, not Linux. I believe it's type "FD". After that, then select "Configure RAID" or something like that, and select RAID1. I've only created a software RAID0, so I'm not quite sure what you'll get after this point. Hopefully it will install grub on both drives, etc.

There is one thing, though. I believe that the Debian installer will install "mdadm", and not "dmraid". I don't know how this will affect your situation. If you run into problems, I'll continue to monitor this thread. I've still got an old Promise FasTrak and a couple of drives that I could put into my spare machine if you need specific help during the process. True, it's not SATA, but the process should be the same.