Cheap Motherboards and Linux RAID

Cheap Motherboards and Linux RAID

[Solid Computing]

If you happen to be unfortunate enough to have also purchased a cheap ASUS K8N VM with the Nforce410 chipset in order to get the software RAID (or anything for that matter) to work you have to disable APIC .  This means APIC modules must not be loaded.

Joe Olstad,
Solid Computing Corp
Edmonton, Canada
780-710-FAST

----- Original Message -----
From: Jeff Garzik <jeff@garzik.org>
Date: Monday, April 3, 2006 4:28 am
Subject: Re: Softraid controllers and Linux

> Jim Klimov wrote:
> > Hello linux-raid,
> > 
> >   I have tried several cheap RAID controllers recently (namely,
> >   VIA VT6421, Intel 6300ESB and Adaptec/Marvell 885X6081).
> >   
> >   VIA one is a PCI card, the second two are built in a Supermicro
> >   motherboard (E7520/X6DHT-G).
> > 
> >   The intent was to let the BIOS of the controllers make a RAID1
> >   mirror of two disks independently of an OS to make redundant
> >   multi-OS booting transparent. While DOS and Windows saw their
> >   mirrors as a singular block device, Linux (FC5) accessed the
> >   two drives separately on all adapters.
> 
> You did not buy a RAID controller.
> 
> http://linux-ata.org/faq-sata-raid.html
> 
> If you really want to use proprietary RAID on Linux, you may use 
> dmraid, 
> but using MD for software RAID is much more robust.
> 
> 	Jeff
> 
> 
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Re: Cheap Motherboards and Linux RAID

[PFC]

> If you happen to be unfortunate enough to have also purchased a cheap  
> ASUS K8N VM with the Nforce410 chipset in order to get the software RAID

	And if you are also unfortunate enough to have bought some newer Maxtor  
SATA harddrives, use the jumper on the drive to revert to SATA150 instead  
of SATA300 ; this will prevent your drives from randomly failing (and  
losing all data) every 2-5 days. If your drive has no jumper, you (should)  
be safe (hopefully). This bug is agnostic and hits windows and linux, with  
nforce 3 and 4 chipsets. On the SATA150 position, the machine has been  
running smoothly for a few months with no problem whatsoever.

> (or anything for that matter) to work you have to disable APIC .  This  
> means APIC modules must not be loaded.