Hello,

I've been running Ubuntu on my Intel raid 0 system for a while now and have been itching to try another distro (Arch namely). While Ubuntu seems to detect and install to my array perfectly, I have had to dink around with dmraid and sometimes mdadm to even get it to install on Arch.(I have not yet booted Arch successfully).
I had wanted to ask what allows Ubuntu to detect and install to my array so seemlessly, while every other distro has been a nightmare.

I realize this is an odd question but any sort of answer could help me to make sense of why raid works easily with Ubuntu but not Arch and what steps I should be taking to install other distros.


Thank you,
John

Rather than me try to explain to you the vagaries of the boot cycle, have a read of this; looks pretty reasonable. I'm sure the Arch wiki will have something similar.

Would also be worthwhile pulling the Ubuntu initramfs apart to see what it installs - and in what order.

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I would say the intel raid driver is not in the initrd in the other distros.

Hello and welcome to LQ.

There is a greater problem. Fake raid cards may seem to be working when in fact they are not. Unless the card goes into a sata only mode, you won't be able to trust it.

The second issue is some update may not work on this goofy card.

Never use linux on a fake or software raid card. Full hardware or some form of OS level raid like LVM, Btrfs, ZFS or mdadm.

Hi Johnmarhut,

Arch user here - I run my server on Arch, configured with a 3-disk LVM on RAID5 setup. The motherboard has "fake-RAID" capability, which, to build on what jefro mentions above, is basically a very minimal implementation of "on-firmware" software RAID, that is highly dependant on OS drivers and the host CPU. That said, there's nothing wrong with using it - it *will* work with Arch, using dmraid. However, there may be little advantage over using pure linux software RAID (mdadm) which is extremely robust and performs just as well on modern hardware.

I decided to ignore the "fake-RAID" implementation of my motherboard and went with pure software RAID. ... 100% always-on reliability for the last 3 years (knock wood ...) and excellent performance. I use the server for file and print, as well as running multiple headless VMs, simultaneously (note that my server is equipped with 32 GB of RAM).

As mentioned by syg00, the Arch Wiki has *excellent* documentation on all possible implementations of RAID and LVM.

Cheers !

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