Re: [PLUG] Ubuntu + RAID5

["Will Dyson" <will.dyson@gmail.com>]

On 9/22/06, Randy Schmidt <x@altorg.com> wrote:
> I'm the highpoint 1640. The individual drives do show up when I first
> boot without loading the module. I have gone back and forth on whether
> I should do a software raid or a hardware raid. I went about setting
> up a software raid first but ultimately settled on doing it the
> hardware way. I like that the hardware will tell me when there is a
> problem with one of the drives.

I haven't been able to find explicit confirmation of this for your
card, but most cheaper (< $300) "raid controllers" do not actually
have any hardware support for raid. Instead, the driver provides its
own implementation of software raid. So you are not gaining much over
the Linux software raid (basicly, just bios support for booting from
the array - and it is possible even that may be made to work in the
future).

Certainly, the 1640 does not appear to have any cache memory chips
on-board, and so cannot accellerate the raid-5 XOR operations.

Mdadm should be started on boot, and read /etc/mdadm.conf to
automaticly start the arrays specified there. If this is not happening
(and you have /etc/mdadm.conf correctly setup), the problem may be
that you need to re-generate the initrd for your kernel. The following
command should do the job for you:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure linux-image-2.6.15-27-686 (or whatever kernel
you have installed)

Also, it just occured to me that the performance problem you are
seeing with the highpoint driver may be caused by a conflict between
the normal linux driver for the individual drives and the highpoint
array driver.

--
Will Dyson
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