Topic: Hardware RAID 1 compatible card

[TomC]

I have an Intel D865GBF motherboard and a couple of different ATA 133 raid cards. One of them an ACARD AEC-6880 is a hardware raid controller. I have used this card before with success, but not with Linux, or SME.
After setting up the mirroring RAID from the cards BIOS, and installing SME just fine (Single Drive) the computer will not boot. It just sits there like there are no drives connected. This is the first time with an Intel motherboard, and I found there is very little control in the bios settings for it. I am not sure if my problem is with the Raid card and linux (sme), or the card and the motherboard. Is there something with the SME setup that I could be missing.
I checked the hardware compatibility list and there is just not many options for basic raid controllers. I hope I am not stuck. I wanted hardware raid because I figured it would be easier to deal with than software if a drive goes down.

[Lex]

Raid is really a disaster with sme.
Normally you boot from Floppy and keep the Shiftlock,
then a prompt appears, enter accept dd.
Then the question do you have drive disk? enter yes.
You will be asked for the driver disk and driver will be loaded. After then a Message appears "Unable to mount fd0"

That´s it. Forget Raid Card which are not supported
by sme.,,.,

I tried to install Highpoint 372 with right kernel, of course but - no chance.

[Anonymous]

So basically forget using a hardware raid card? Bummer... While waiting for help on this, I went and did the software raid with having two matched drives on the mobo's ide channels. To test a couple of things I pulled out the second drive (hdc) and got the expected error in the logs. What do I need to do to re-sync this drive or setup a new one in it's place (simulating the failure and now recovery). With the hardware cards I have used in the past, the controller did this automatically. What do I need to do with SME to do this with the software raid config.

[Anonymous]

Read RAID recovery how-to by Darrell May

[KelvinLee]

Hi Tom,

I've worked with the ACARD AEC 6880. In short, SME does not support it out of the box. The driver disk provided with the card supposedly has a driver for the kernel used by SME (I was working with SME 5.6), but SME will not recognise it. I have tested the card in both RH 7.3 and RH 8.0 with no problems. I have to agree with Lex's comments about SME and RAID cards.

All is not lost however. You could :-
1. Use a RAID card that's supported out of the box like the 3Ware cards for IDE, Mylex cards and others for SCSI.

or

2. Use OS independent RAID subsystems like the Accusys ACS7500 :-

http://www.quasarsoft.com.au/hardware/index.php?topic=storage

Obviously, I use a lot of these. The benefits over the software (and even some hardware cards) RAID-1 are great.

Cheers,

Kelvin