Intel RAID driver

[mets6986]

Installed RHEL5 on a Intel DQ35JO motherboard. Was able to get by the initial problem of acpi? The new problem is that I can't find a RAID driver to use the onboard sata drives in a RAID 5 configuration? I'm using a WD80G as my OS drive on the IDE controller of the mobo. I want to install (3), 250GB sata drives as a seperate RAID 5. The motherboard bios lets me setup the raid, but the REDHAT OS doesn't recognize the RAID as being present. I don't want the OS to be part of the RAID. Does anybody know of the correct driver to use for this? Thankyou.

[coopstah13]

are you using linux only?

if so, i recommend using software raid instead of on board "fakeraid" chip, they don't really have good support under linux and don't provide any advantage to user over software raid since its not a true hardware raid device

Intel Rapid Storage Technology - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[Rubberman]

are you using linux only?

if so, i recommend using software raid instead of on board "fakeraid" chip, they don't really have good support under linux and don't provide any advantage to user over software raid since its not a true hardware raid device

Intel Rapid Storage Technology - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

My opinion also. I have an Intel mobo (S5000xvn) that has some hardware sata raid support, and an add-on esata raid controller, but I prefer to use the Linux system software raid support. Works great, and has good management tools as well.

[avalonit]

Maybe this board has a fake RAID, or BIOS RAID (however you like to call it) and actually depends on the OS to do the hard work. The only benefit is that you can boot from the other drive if one fails. That's enough benefit in some cases but requires more work to setup properly. So maybe as others suggested, just go for the normal software raid.

P.S. I have not set up a BIOS RAID configuraiton since the time one needed to craft a special boot script in initrd to have it working so maybe I'm exaggerating the difficulty to set-up.

P.P.S. If you are using the Red Hat Enterprise Linux then you have a subscription so you can look at access.redhat.com/kb/docs/DOC-52586 and access.redhat.com/kb/docs/DOC-1504 and if it doesn't help, you can drop a mail to support.

[coopstah13]

another advantage is if for some reason some hardware fails on the motherboard, it may be difficult or impossible to recover your raid as you will need to find a device that can understand the setup that was configured, but any linux distro that can understand software raid will be able to recover your array

[avalonit]

another advantage is if for some reason some hardware fails on the motherboard, it may be difficult or impossible to recover your raid as you will need to find a device that can understand the setup that was configured, but any linux distro that can understand software raid will be able to recover your array

In fact with BIOS raid, once created linux can still recognize the raid on another machine that does not support the same kind of RAID. Linux rocks!

With hardware raid it will also be possible for linux to read it, but the problem is one needs to know the structure used by the hardware raid and then be able to tell device mapper create the necessary block device. This requires above average knowledge though.