suse 9.1 on via sata raid?

[dakota81]

Putting together a new machine - I'm fairly unfamiliar with linux still - want to put mirroring on two sata drives. Suse is not recognizing any hardware raid, rather it's recognizing both drives individually. Is there any way to do this? For this particular machine it's not built for performance, just something to "get the job done" and we'd go with software raid over spending $500 or so on a PCI raid controller. But if it would work, would much rather have hardware raid on the VT8237 chip.

Thanks

 

[sleipnir214]

This site:

http://www.linuxmafia.com/faq/Hardware/sata.html

States that some SATA cards are not true RAID devices.



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[ryan944]

I'm not very familiar with Linux either, but I'm trying to do this exact same thing, only my SATA Controller is built-in to my motherboard (ASUS A7N8X-Deluxe). Now, the controller that Asus has put in there, is a Silicon Image 3112 SATA Raid controller. You can get that exact same version in a PCI card package for about $17.00. Not $500. That card will do RAID 0 or 1 (striping/mirroring respectively).

The only problem is, is that even if you do set up a RAID array and get it working, when you start the installation of SUSE 9.1, it will find the array, but it won't be able to store any information to the SATA disks. It's just not capable to use these types of disks yet. I have found through research that supposedly only linux kernel versions 2.4x and 2.6x will work with SATA drives at this time. If you have a 64 bit processor, there is a patch available at: "

http://portal.suse.com"

As for me, I don't think I'm going to be able to put Linux on my machine unless they support SATA out of the box, I find a patch and somehow figure out how to load it during installation/pre-installation, or if I go out and learn how to program and make my own patch! (not-happening)

Well anyway, good luck to ya, and here's a link to that $17 PCI SATA RAID card just in case!

http://www.pcimicro.com/.sc/ms/dd/1...202%20Port%20Serial%20ATA%20controller%20card

 

[dakota81]

Actually found out we are forced to use a hardware raid setup so that the tape backup software will work...

The Promise chipsets (20326 & 20328 I believe are the models) that are onboard some motherboards do true hardware raid, and also Promise makes a pci hardware raid card for ~$70 that does the job very nicely. Only issue with Promise hardware is they are not yet supported under kernel 2.6, so suse 9.0 is the most current version that can be used.


The only reason didn't get the mobo with onboard Promise controller in the first place was that it is only found with nForce2 chipsets on the AMD side - and Seagate's ide tapedrives are not compatible with the nForce2's ide controller...

 

[LawnBoy]

SuSE 9.1 is a 2.6 kernel, SuSE 9.0 is a 2.4 kernel.

 

[Visseroth]

I'm not totally familiar with SATA ATM but I can tell you that a SATA RAID setup is not currently supported by any Linux Kernels, but is being worked on and last I heard from the Gentoo forums was being resolved in the 2.6.6 rc1 love kernel.

I'd give it time before it's truely avaliable and working well