Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Hosting Security and Technology : Howto use SuperMicro Onboard raid on CentOS?

[DennisCitus]

I want to install Centos 3.4 on a raid-server with raid-onboard. After I've build the raid-array, CentOS still shows 2 hdd's, which is wrong.

The solution is downloading the raid-drivers for RHEL3, so I have done. But I must have the raid-drivers installed before Linux-install or the CentOS installer will still show 2 HDD's instead of 1 RAID'ed HDD....

How is this done?

[Inthrive]

What model is the motherboard? Are you sure it's a hardware based RAID card and not software based? A software based RAID card will behave as you've described.

[KDAWebServices]

If it's a new SM board, then at a guess it'll be the Silicon Image RAID chipset - which is rather poor, even under Windows, as it is software based.

[DigitalN]

Onboard Raid doesn't generally work well with linux, if at all - I'd recommend getting a 3ware Hardware Raid Card and using that.

I use have used P4SCI mobo's with windows and onboard RAID 1 effectively though.

[DennisCitus]

http://www.supermicro.com/products/m...7210/P4SCi.cfm
Adaptec ICH5-R / 6300ESB (RAID)

[Inthrive]

• SATA Controller on-chip (Intel® 6300ESB)
• Dual Serial ATA ports
• RAID 0, 1 Supported

If you're just looking for RAID 1, you might want to use software RAID. It doesn't look like you'll be able to install linux on an arrary with the 6300ESB.

[DennisCitus]

@Inthrive:
We done that.

It seemed that we had two choices. Or try using the RHEL-kernel from www.supermicro.com on CentOS. We would no longer be able to update our kernel from then. This kernel was already outdated. We found that this was not a solution.

The 2nd choise was Hardware or Software. As it was a dedicated-server, we decided not to buy a $150 3-ware controller. After investigating we found out that software-raid is a good solution too. It's not too hard to restore a raid-array using software-raid in CentOS.

[Inthrive]

I'm glad to hear you got things working. I agree, using a customized kernel from a 3rd party can cause all kinds of problems when trying to upgrade, especially when they don't keep up to date. While a hardware solution might have provided faster access times and features such as hot-swap, software RAID has been proven effective.