Hardware(?) RAID advice needed

HymnToLife · n00b Joined: 06 Jun 2007 Posts: 54 Location: Brest, France

Hi everyone

So here's the deal: I have a machine that is dual-booting Gentoo and Windows, and has three 500 GB drives in RAID-5. So far, it is a Linux software RAID (mdadm), but I would like to be able to access it from Windows as well. As I uderstand it, there is no software RAID solution that will let me do this, and I can't use the "pseudo-hardware" RAID of my MOBO (nvidia chipset), am I right?

In that case, I guess the only option left is buying a real hardware RAID PCI card. Can anyone recomment one that is reasonably priced but still of good quality (performance isn't a concern, but relibaility is)?

Thanks in advance!
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Easiest way never leads anywhere...

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Thu Aug 14, 2008 5:52 pm Post subject:

HymnToLife,

You can use your fakeraid motherboard raid in both Windows and Linux but I'm not aware of any fakeraid controllers that support raid5.
Several support raid10, which is a striped mirror or mirrored stripes (I forget which).
Consider adding another drive and using raid10, rather than real hardware raid. An extra 500G drive to add to your existing 3 will be lower cost than a real raid card and will provide the same level of redundancy.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

HymnToLife · n00b Joined: 06 Jun 2007 Posts: 54 Location: Brest, France

Thanks for the answer.

Actually, the manual of my motherboard says the fakeraid controller supports RAID-5, so I guess I'll be able to do it using this guide.
_________________
Easiest way never leads anywhere...

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Thu Aug 14, 2008 7:22 pm Post subject:

HymnToLife,

Looks promising. Read up on on dmraid - check that it can support raid5.

The low level data format on the drives under kernel raid and dmraid is quite different. You will not be able to convert with your data in place.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

HeissFuss · Guru Joined: 11 Jan 2005 Posts: 414

I wouldn't recommend the dm-raid5 in Linux. It's basically an alpha kernel patch, so I wouldn't be too trusting of it. The performance is probably aweful too.

Something I've considered for a similar situation but never had a chance to try is to set up vmware or virtualbox in Windows, install Linux in it and give it raw access to your drives. In theory you should be able to assemble your md-raid and then share it with SMB. I've never actually tried though, so it may not work.