SATA raid options..

SATA raid options..

[Daniel Kirkegaard Mouritsen]

I own a Gigabyte GA-8KNXP motherboard, which has 4 serial-ata ports. Two
of which features RAID functionality.

The serial-ata controller on the motherboard is a Silicon Image 3112A (a
chip which i haven't been able to find much information about,
siimage.com doesn't even list it as a product).

I'll soon get a new sata disk(identical to my current disk), and I would
love to be able to do the following:

* keep using a 2.6.* kernel
* Use the RAID BIOS administration interface to stripe/administer the
disks
* Have both my grub, /boot / and a NTFS-windows partition reside on
striped set.

Is this at all possible? Can GRUB detect devices created with the
on-board BIOS assisted raid?

Another thing, I'm getting severely confused what I'm supposed to use as
a driver for the thing. ATM I found: udev+raiddetect or the
not-yet-released(or is it? maybe its just me who cant find it :]) dmraid
is the way to go. Does these both use the device-mapper tool? And can
anybody tell me if dmraid is 2 or 20 months aways?

Re: SATA raid options..

[Jeff Garzik]

Daniel Kirkegaard Mouritsen wrote:
> I own a Gigabyte GA-8KNXP motherboard, which has 4 serial-ata ports. Two
> of which features RAID functionality.
> 
> The serial-ata controller on the motherboard is a Silicon Image 3112A (a
> chip which i haven't been able to find much information about,
> siimage.com doesn't even list it as a product).
> 
> I'll soon get a new sata disk(identical to my current disk), and I would
> love to be able to do the following:
> 
> * keep using a 2.6.* kernel
> * Use the RAID BIOS administration interface to stripe/administer the
> disks
> * Have both my grub, /boot / and a NTFS-windows partition reside on
> striped set.
> 
> Is this at all possible? Can GRUB detect devices created with the
> on-board BIOS assisted raid?
> 
> Another thing, I'm getting severely confused what I'm supposed to use as
> a driver for the thing. ATM I found: udev+raiddetect or the
> not-yet-released(or is it? maybe its just me who cant find it :]) dmraid
> is the way to go. Does these both use the device-mapper tool? And can
> anybody tell me if dmraid is 2 or 20 months aways?

dmraid will be required for use, and its 2-4 months away, I would guess.

Why not just use md raid?  BIOS RAID is _always_ crap.

	Jeff

Re: SATA raid options..

[John Lange]

First you should consult
http://www.linuxmafia.com/faq/Hardware/sata.html to read up on your chip
set a bit.

The bottom line is, kernel support for bios "raid" is in the works but
marginal at this time.

As far as I'm aware there isn't any advantage to using these built in
sudo-raid devices. Software raid should outperform it in most all cases.

John

On Sat, 2004-07-03 at 09:34, Daniel Kirkegaard Mouritsen wrote:
> I own a Gigabyte GA-8KNXP motherboard, which has 4 serial-ata ports. Two
> of which features RAID functionality.
> 
> The serial-ata controller on the motherboard is a Silicon Image 3112A (a
> chip which i haven't been able to find much information about,
> siimage.com doesn't even list it as a product).
> 
> I'll soon get a new sata disk(identical to my current disk), and I would
> love to be able to do the following:
> 
> * keep using a 2.6.* kernel
> * Use the RAID BIOS administration interface to stripe/administer the
> disks
> * Have both my grub, /boot / and a NTFS-windows partition reside on
> striped set.
> 
> Is this at all possible? Can GRUB detect devices created with the
> on-board BIOS assisted raid?
> 
> Another thing, I'm getting severely confused what I'm supposed to use as
> a driver for the thing. ATM I found: udev+raiddetect or the
> not-yet-released(or is it? maybe its just me who cant find it :]) dmraid
> is the way to go. Does these both use the device-mapper tool? And can
> anybody tell me if dmraid is 2 or 20 months aways?
> 
> -
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-- 
John Lange
BigHostBox.com
(204) 885 0872

Re: SATA raid options..

[Ricky Beam]

On Sat, 3 Jul 2004, Jeff Garzik wrote:
>dmraid will be required for use, and its 2-4 months away, I would guess.
>
>Why not just use md raid?  BIOS RAID is _always_ crap.

Because Linux is not the only OS using the drives.  I do the same thing
with my 4 drives... Linux RAID0's them mostly like the BIOS.  Linux can
muck with the NTFS section (most of the array), the XFS section (40G), and
the 8G swap partition (tmpfs space mostly.)  And Win XP is happy with
them as well ('tho it has no understanding of XFS.)

(this rest of mostly off on a tangent...)

However, getting GRUB to play nicely is turning into a problem... stage1
will load stage1.5 or stage2 without issue even with them *way* out on the
"drive"; however, stage1.5 cannot load stage2 and stage2 cannot touch the
drive.  (Error 17... it cannot recognize the xfs partition)  Stage2 reboots
the machine if it tries to touch the drive.  If you're not using an Opteron,
you might get further. *grin*

--Ricky