Update: The more reading I do, the more I don't think this is an easily accomplished goal. I'll leave the post for future travelers but I guess option 1 is to use a dedicated RAID card for simplifying having a RAID 1 for your boot device or option 2, install your OS on drive 1 and use Timeshift to create snapshots on drive 2.


I was wanting to install Antergos onto a 'fake' array created by my motherboard BIOS. Is that possible? I was reading this article https://medium.com/@pmarrapese/arch-...d-cece10b61ac3 and it sounds like even if you create a fake array, the Linux installer will still need some special attention to actually boot from it. That true?

On the other hand, if you can create your fake array and EASILY install Linux onto it, how do you monitor the Intel array for drive failures? Can MDADM see into the fake array or is that why all those extra steps are needed in that article so MDADM can hook into the array?

I'm just use to Windows in that, create the fake array with the BIOS..... install Windows to the single drive letter and install the Intel tools to manage the array and that's it.

Unless something changed that I missed, Windows and Linux are alike in that with BIOS RAID, when the motherboard dies, the content on the RAID dies with it. Software RAID, and RAID using a separate RAID card, won't produce such calamity.

as mrmazda stated, better off with a hardware RAID card, using the OS to build a software RAID. Another option in Linux is to use LVM and span across the drives. That makes something like a RAID0. So no parity, no redundancy. Lose a drive, lose data. Just like RAID1 and RAID 10. Lose a drive, lose data.

If you have the drives look into RAID6 as that will give you 2 drives for failover. Lose up to 2 drives and lose zero data. RAID5 unless using 5 drives will not let you lose a drive without losing data.

For my server I use RAID6, for my workstation i dont bother with RAID and just back the data up to my server so if I lose a drive, i just replace the drive and restore from my server.