[ML-General] hardware RAID

[Brian Oborn]

On Tue, Jun 16, 2015 at 10:18 AM, WebDawg <webdawg at gmail.com> wrote:

> Now I have a question about raid stuff.
>
> Recently I have some equipment that was enterprise level equipment that
> had FakeRAID.  It was a supermicro server with an option to switch the raid
> ROM between Adaptec and Intel.  Both were fake raid.
>
> The software that I was setting up on the system could not use FakeRAID
> and I ended up putting in a SAS LSI Raid card.
>
> I have another system I have to setup that has some flexibility and I
> would much rather use the FakeRAID then hardware raid to save the cash.
>
> This being said, it looks like either mdadm or dmraid have built in
> support for intel fake raid and such.
>
> What I have not found in my research is if it works like hardware raid
> does.  That is, when using this fakeraid stuff, does it clone the
> bootloader and such?
>
> Does it operate like hardware raid but offload all the processing and such
> to the CPU?
>
> I could see how the fakeraid option ROM could handle the boot, and then
> grub/whatever mounts the mdadm fake raid.
>
> Anyone know?
>
> I would highly recommend not using any FakeRAID with Linux. I've done it
before (in order to dual-boot a workstation) and it was a real pain. If
you're going hardware RAID, fine. But if you're going to do it all in
software, you might as well just use the mdadm in the normal manner (it's
really not that hard) and it will be more resilient if you need to move it
to a new machine. The few bits in the ROM that the FakeRAID gives you
really do nothing helpful.
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