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Help setting up RAID on OpenFiler?

agrikk

agrikk

Gawd
Joined
Apr 16, 2002
Messages
933
I have the SD-SATA2-4IR card and I am trying to use it with Openfiler v2.3.

I have flashed the BIOS on the card to the latest raid-enabled version and have configured the device for a 4-(750gb) drive 1.5TB RAID-10 array. When I start the installation process OpenFiler sees the drives attached to the card as 4 750 gig drives instead of the single 1.5TB volume.

Is this by design or is something misconfigured?

I tried installing windows XP on the same configuration and windows sees the single 1.5TB volume, so I'm pretty sure I have it configured correctly.

Will a *nix-based OS always see drives attached to this card as distinct drives or can I configure it somehow to see just a single RAID volume? I would rather not have to use software raid on this box.
 
This is not a real RAID card, it doesn't do RAID. Software RAID will be faster and more reliable than the fakeraid it implements in the Windows driver anyway.
 
Fake raid? Can you explain further? How does a single volume appear in windows but not in linux?
 
agrikk said:
Fake raid? Can you explain further? How does a single volume appear in windows but not in linux?
Click to expand...

For $40 you don't get hardware RAID. It does RAID on the host CPU via drivers and some BIOS hacks. The Linux drivers don't support this since it's a useless feature when high-quality and consistent software RAID is already included.
 
agrikk said:
Will a *nix-based OS always see drives attached to this card as distinct drives or can I configure it somehow to see just a single RAID volume? I would rather not have to use software raid on this box.
Click to expand...

For all intents and purposes, you are already using software RAID. fakeRAID, as mentioned by keenan, is pretty much where there's a chip that handles the setup and maintenance of the RAID array while using the PC's CPU to handle all of the parity calculations. With Software RAID, the OS handles the setup and maintenance of the RAID array while using the PC's CPU to handle all of the parity calculations. So basically fakeRAID is pretty close to software RAID. That card you have is fakeRAID.

Now with that said, are you sure that the card has support for OpenSolaris?
 
I originally bought the card for its four SATA II ports, but recently decided to use it in an OpenFiler. I think I would have been pretty miffed if I'd bought this card for its RAID perfomance. Heh heh.

I started the OpenFiler installation process and it detected the card and its drives just fine, so I don't think there will be any support issues other than the fact that it sees four drives instead of a single array. I'm going to re-flash the card BIOS back to the controller version instead of the RAID version, just so I'm not tempted at some point to try and build a RAID array on it some day
 
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