BIOS SATA raid support

[AlienNation]

I just got a new system with bios raid support (i915 chipset) and a couple of sata disks that I'd really like to set up in a raid. It's important for me to be able to dual-boot with Windows so software raid from within Linux isn't really a good option for me.

I'd like to use the bios raid functionality of my mainboard but I gather that Linux doesn't support that very well yet? However, I've been reading about dmraid which seems promising and I've also had a look at the gen2dmraid (http://tienstra4.flatnet.tudelft.nl/~gerte/gen2dmraid/) live cd which uses dmraid to provide support for bios raid. Haven't tried it yet though.

Has anyone got bios raid working in Linux? Or does anyone know of any news about when/if it will be supported in the 2.6 kernel?

Thanks

[AlienNation]

Oh, and I forgot that I also wonder if I will suffer any performance loss when partitioning the raid setup?

[StarTiger]

I setup a raid setup last week and have been playing with it. It's been quite fun actually.

RAID suppoort has been around for years. What you may be thinking of is the Linux driver support for your mobo.

I asume you want to setup a hardware RAID. Correct? What type of RAID are you looking at? RAID0, 1, 0+1,? What type of Mobo and Drives do you have?

the one thing you need is the RAID drivers for linux. Once you setup the RAID at the bios level, you have to load the RAID drivers at the beginning of your linux install. After that, your OS (windows, Linux, etc) it sees it as just another harddrive.

Read throught the documentation that came with your mobo about how to setup the RAID.

I've got two 250Mb SATA drives under a RAID1 with FC4 on it and it runs great.

Oh, and I forgot that I also wonder if I will suffer any performance loss when partitioning the raid setup?

You shouldn't. Infact, you should have the opposite: a rather noticable boost in preformance.

[AlienNation]

Well, it's not really hardware raid but the kind of bios software raid that's been increasingly common lately (haven't tried it myself yet though).

I'm ripping my hair out trying to find the manual for my mobo, I didn't get it when buying the pc and on the manufacturers site, Fujitsu-Siemens, it doesn't say exactly either, just that it uses the Intel i915 chipset. Guess I'll have to contact them.

However, the setting up of the raid shouldn't be much of a problem. I'll use raid 0 with two 250gb sata disks. The problem with the bios raid (since it's actually done in software), as I get it, is that Linux identifies the two disks separately and not as one large raided disk. This is where dmraid, as I mentioned in my first post, comes into play.

Still, I might be way off on this entire thing... :)

Thanks alot