Precision 490, FC6 and Hardware Raid

[Barry Allard]

Hey John,

Correct as per digging through Intel and LSI drivers by PCI ID.  Intel 5000X
chipset contains "ESB2," with SW XOR raid 5 option.

Regards,
Barry Allard

-----Original Message-----
From: John_Hull at Dell.com [mailto:John_Hull at Dell.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, May 01, 2007 4:42 AM
To: ballard at stanford.edu; rusty at s5w.com
Cc: linux-precision at lists.us.dell.com
Subject: RE: Precision 490, FC6 and Hardware Raid

The RAID on the SATA controller is not actually hardware RAID, but a
driver-based (software) RAID. You would actually need 2 sets of drivers for
this to work: the actual controller driver (ahci or ata_piix), which is
present since you can see the disks, and a driver for the software RAID
portion (dmraid). For RHEL 4, Red Hat has not added dmraid support to their
installer, which is why you're seeing 2 disks instead of a RAID volume. 

If you have to use RHEL 4, our recommendation is to disable the RAID
provided by the system, and use the software RAID that the Linux kernel
provides (md). You'll still get the NCQ feature you're looking for, and get
a better supported and manageable software RAID as well. 

-----Original Message-----
From: linux-precision-bounces at dell.com
[mailto:linux-precision-bounces at dell.com] On Behalf Of Barry Allard
Sent: Monday, April 30, 2007 2:24 PM
To: rusty at s5w.com
Cc: linux-precision-Lists
Subject: RE: Precision 490, FC6 and Hardware Raid

Hi Rusty,

Did Dell help get your system working with hardware raid-1 yet?  

In the RHEL 4 installer, our SATA drives show up individually instead of as
one array.  The minimum goal is to get some good drivers for the controller
to get NCQ going.  We can't go RHEL 5 because it's not supported by our
folks and it's too new.  Ideally, Intel should support Linux better 

We're trying to install RHEL as per the following:

OS: RHEL 4 Update 4 AS x86_64  original iso as downloaded directly from RHN,
md5 verified.
Hardware: Precision 490
Bios: A04
Controller: "Intel 631xESB/632xESB SATA RAID Controller" pci id: 8086:2682,
firmware: 5.6.2.1002
Drives: 2 x 160 GB 10k SATA, WDC WD1600ADFS-75SLR2, both firmware: 21.07Q21
Ordered RAID config: C4- All SATA Hard Drives, RAID1 for 2 Hard Drives, Dell
Precision 690 (341-3433)

Tried with and without driver floppies from R131526.

Kind Regards,
Barry Allard
Stanford Medical Informatics (SMI)
Work: +1.650.723.7270 Pacific Time (shared with Alex Skrenchuk, rings
through to his cell.)
 
If you can't reach me, try Alex.  alexskr at stanford.edu


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