On-board RAID question

[sbayless@palcotelecom.com]

I have an Intel SE732DVP2 1U rackserver with SATA RAID support built in to the motherboard. I setup the RAID using its bootup BIOS control to do mirroring on 2 drives before I installed Untangle. However, Untangle offered me 2 choices of locations for installation?? Does that mean that its not using the RAID? How can I tell?

Also, I went to Intel's website and downloaded the latest BIOS, drivers, etc. for the server. It has a RAID driver for SuSE Linux and also one for Red Hat Linux. Would either of those work? (I am not a Linux person at all, sorry, but if someone could give me instructions, I'm pretty good at following them.)

This server is not in production yet, its still on the bench. So I can try just about anything. Its hard to pull drives out of though, not hot-swap, and cable management inside the 1U chassis is very tight.

[jgedeon]

Yes that means that it is not seeing a raid. Raid drivers for a distro are normally for software raid and not hardware raid.

[hescominsoon]

actually you have it backwards. 99% of all motherboard based raid is FRAID or fakeraid. FRAID is simply a binary driver that fakes like it's hardware but it's really software raid..aka everything is handled by your cpu.. Turn off the onboard raid it does nothing. If untanlgle allowed you to setup Linux kernel software raid that's done via dma and therefore does not hammer your cpu(at least for raid 1..you never want to do raid 5 in software). Go get a 3ware card if you want to do true raid.

[sbayless@palcotelecom.com]

Thanks for your replies! This server doesn't have any expansion slots, so I can't add a card. (Its supposed to have an expansion riser, but it came to us as an OEM video conferencing server and that riser was not included.)
Would the software raid from either the suse or Red Hat be better than no raid at all? How badly would it degrade two dual core Xeon 2.8GHzs? (we will have somewhere between 200 and 350 users behind it.) Or should I just backup regularly and figure on a reinstall/restore every now and then?

[hescominsoon]

if you use RAID 1 from the linux kernel you won't see any hit at all..any other level and you're hosed

[sbayless@palcotelecom.com]

Cool, I would be using RAID1. But I don't know enough about linux to know what "from the kernel" means. :-( What product or download or command do I use to get there from here? (sorry!)

[hescominsoon]

just setup the raid from inside whatever distribution you are using and it's fine..

[hescominsoon]

just setup the raid from inside whatever distribution you are using and it's fine..

let me clarify it's done at install of the operating system.

[sbayless@palcotelecom.com]

I used the standalone bootable Untangle CD, so where does that leave me? (besides lost, LOL)

[hescominsoon]

AFAIK untangle does not support software raid in any form.