Topic: Intel S5000XVN - hardware or software RAID

[miki]

Hi!

My server configuration is based on Intel S5000XVN SATA motherboard with 2GB of RAM and two 160GB SATA HDDs. Motherboard has integrated RAID controller but I'm not shure how good it is. I just need RAID 1. I tried both installation and when hw raid is off, everything is OK but I'm thinking that maybe hw raid is better because less CPU utilization.

When I done installation with hw raid on and options sme noraid, SME 7.2 server mounts root filesystem to /dev/mapper/main-root but I'm not sure if data is written to both disks. Both discs are recognized by kernel. After some work I reset to raid BIOS and started consistency check and  some differences are found and repaired.

How to check if SME server is properly using hw raid and be sure that consistency check wont find any differences?

Should I turn off hw raid and use SME sw raid?



Also, while booting this message is reported:

Mount local filesystems: mount: LABEL=/boot duplicate not mounted - FAILED

What to do to avoid this problem?


Kernel reports:
ata1:  SATA link up 1.5 Gbps
ata2:  SATA link up 1.5 Gbps
but I know that both motherboard (sata controller) and disks are capable of 3.0 Gbps. How to improve this?

Thanks!

[miki]

I found on net (but still not sure) that raid on this mbo is software raid so I turned it off and installed SME again with software raid.

Now my disks are reported as:

SATA max UDMA/133

Is it some kind of compatibility mode? Are my disks running at their best?

When hw raid was on autoprobed disk controller driver was ahci now it is ata_piix.