How to setup RAID 0 in SuSE?

[phsieh2005]

Dear Linux experts:

I just assembled a new computer with 2 SATA hard drives. Motherboard is Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS3R that supports Raid 0/1/5/10. According to the manual, I can select Raid level in BIOS (planning to use RAID 0), after saving the BIOS and booting up to OS, it only mention MS Windows (XP and Vista) that some software installation/configuration is required. So, how to do this in SuSE? Can someone post some sites so that I can learn about this? Thanks!

phsieh2005

[wildpossum]

Have to looked in the SuSE Knowledge Base ?

It is probably do-able but, I never trust s/w RAID to start with. It can and does screw up your system if you have the slightest memory or PSU hich-up (from many years, many system - experience).

[phsieh2005]

Hi, wildpossum,

Thanks for the reply!

I am hoping that I do not have to do sw Raid. I thought that the motherboard has a raid controller. So, after setting up raid 0 in bios, do I have to do anything in SuSE? Most of the SuSE raid stuffs talked about s/w raid which I would like to avoid.

phsieh2005

[HROAdmin26]

Software RAID (md driver) in Linux is reliable and very fast as well on any modern CPU. Unless you paid *a lot* for your motherboard, the RAID chip included is *not* a true HW RAID controller - it implements RAID through software (the device driver.) You can search and find other threads on this topic.

If you want to use the mobo RAID, you'll likely need to download a Linux driver for the RAID controller.

SuSE Installation Docs

[wildpossum]

I use a 3ware h/w raid controller. Yep cost more than the motherboard itself, but the saying - What you pay for IS what you get is never so more true than with raid. Anything other than a addon h/w raid controller is s/w raid no matter what any salesman says. I run OpenSuSE 10.3 and I am currently running 11.0 + KDE4. I have run SuSE since 6.something.

On my systems the early s/w raid was iffy, unless you can run ECC memory (and your added the ECC correction module, which most people don't even think about) enabled. RAID 0 & 1 will NOT save you from memory or I/O channel glitches that is fact, RAID 5, 50, 6, 60 does dependent on the h/w controller and again you have to have battery backup for the on card cache.

I wouldn't worry too much is your only using the system non critically, otherwise you would be nuts NOT to use a addon RAID controller. You would be more secure using straight SATA2 (for i/o thrughput) and fast rotational and good on-disk cache, which would give you the best possible I/O +++ lots of memory. Do some empirical tests to prove this too yourself

[HROAdmin26]

While I prefer 15K SAS/FC drives in an array/dedicated controller, I can't argue with the fact that a single SATA pushes 90MB/Sec while md RAID 0 pushes 175MB/Sec. So if I am working with a machine with 2 drives, they *usually* get striped. Sometimes it might make sense to stripe half the disk and mirror the other half, etc.

In one example, I have ~30 fairly beefy machines all running SLES 10 as VM Server hosts - all with striped SATA drives to take advantage of the higher throughput for the VM's. They've had no issues minus a few HDD failures.

The OP already stated his intention to use RAID 0 - this implies this is not holding crucial data. No RAID will protect from corrupted/deleted/bad data - that's where backups come into play.

My desktop controller - might be time for something SAS now...

[phsieh2005]

Thanks you all for the answer!

Yes, I have two WD Raptor (10K rpm) HDs. I am building a cluster to perform parallel computing. The server node will have raid 0. I read some where that said I can get faster HD read/write in raid 0. Data is not super critical.

Got reply from Gigabyte support. I will need a linux driver. Can you post some basic raid 0 setup so that I can learn about raid? Where can I download linux driver for OpenSUSE 10.3 x86_64? Thanks!

phsieh2005