SATA RAID card
 

I am trying to use the onboard SATA RAID (8237) for my MSI K8T800 master2 (Opteron) server, with little success. I can get Gentoo 2004.1 64, and FC2 64 to install and use one of the drives no problem, it does require me to pass pci=noacpi to the kernel in order to boot. But getting them to work as a RAID is just not working. They are not being treated as one, and I can not find almost any documentation about getting this running. I have compiled my own good kernels, I have used the drivers provided, and compiled source drivers for this. They work fine with getting SATA running but a RAID is not happening very easy. I am not expecting anyone to be able to help with this issue since all of the hardware and software is so new, I am sure many of you have not had any experience with this setup. But if you do have any experience with this setup I would greatly appreciate any advice you have.

So what I am doing is trying to find a hardware RAID controller for SATA. The 8237 (VT6420) is not actually a hardware RAID solution. It uses the CPU, and kernel of the OS to do the work. I need a good real SATA RAID card that will work in a 64bit environment 2.4 or 2.6 kernel support. I have heard good things about the SiS controllers, and the Promise controllers. I was just hoping to get some input from all of you before purchasing.

I bet if I asked questions about which distro rules, and which admins are more elite, everyone here would respond.

When I first came here everyone was helpful, now everyone does not know what they are talking about, all they want to help with are easy problems (posers). Ahh well I will continue to help with whatever I can.

I have abandoned my MSI Master2-FAR and bought a Tyan S2885. Couldn't get the onboard net working at all - system wouldn't even boot with it enabled. The Tyan is just as tricky :o(

Assuming your board runs stably, you have the right RAM (I have gone through £800 worth trying to get some that worked), you should be able to get RAID working quite easily.

As long as the drives are recognised, you can configure software RAID. I tried a 4 port Highpoint Rocket 1540 - guess what machine won't boot with it in (neither will the Tyan). I think 3Ware make hardware RAID cards that work with Linux, whether they will work with Opteron boards is another matter.

There are howtos on the net on setting up RAID, some of which are incomprehensible. I used to spend hours fiddling with things to get them working, now I can't be bothered. I suggest you download webmin (you'll need to download the source code and install from that), which has a very easy GUI tool to set up RAID. When I got the Tyan board with it's 4 channel SATA, it set up RAID5 without me having to pull any hair out.

I think this bleeding edge hardware obsession of mine is going to be over very soon. If I could get this damned machine to work consistently, it'll be up for sale!

Jim

I am becoming very frustrated with this. I have done major reading, and it does not matter what board I read about they are having the same problems. It seems that this controller, and chipset work great with Windows, but once again Linux gets screwed. Via says that there drivers are the best and seamless Linux drivers out there. BFS!!!!!

I had it working fine as a mirrored pair of drives with Fedora core 64 bit. Mind you, the rest of the hardware didn't "quite" work...

This is the price we pay for having bleeding edge hardware. I'm possibly the first person in the world to put a pair of 848's in a dual CPU board, and find that they appear as 838's!