Asus M4A87TD/USB3 870 Socket AM3 ----- Raid Drivers

[fibres]

Hi Guys

I have bought the above board and today built my new Core using this board.

Everything seems to be going ok except for the fact that neither 0810 or 1004 seem to pick up the RAID 5 array I have configured.
They see all 4 seperate 2TB drives but do not see it as a single RAID 5 array,

Any pointers here would be great.

Regards

[Marie.O]

Probably due to the fact, that the "RAID" Controller on your board is not supported by Linux out of the box. Two choices: Either go to your manufacturer and ask for the Linux driver for Ubuntu 810 or 1004. Or do the right thing, break up your controller "RAID" and make a mdadm-based RAID. The advantage of the mdadm-based RAID is, that in case of mainboard failure, your data won't be lost, but a new mainboard will pick it up right away.

[fibres]

Hi posde

Thanks for the quick reply.
I guessed it was a driver issue, I probably should have been more specific, was really wondering if anyone had success with getting the drivers.

Quick query with Mdadm? Firstly is there any performance issues running this?
And secondly,
I have 1x 250gb drive for linuxmce
4x 2tb drives which I am using for raid5 array for media.
I have done this so I can easily reinstall linuxmce on the 250gb without touching the array.
If I use Mdadm and I reinstall linuxmce will it automatically pickup the raid after reinstall?

Regards

[sambuca]

Just a thought:

What is most important to have available, the LinuxMCE system itself or your media?

br,
sambuca

[Marie.O]

fibres,

the performance issues are neglectable if compared against a real hardware RAID, and non-existant if compared against most any "RAID" I have seen on mainboards.

and sambuca has a point. If you want safety against failing harddrives, you might want to consider adding a RAID1 for the system drive.

[fibres]

Hi Guys

Sambuca has a valid point, However in my opinion, Linuxmce is reinstallable. It may be a bit of a pain to have to reinstall and reconfigure linuxmce but is not the end of world. However to lose 6tb of media would be a major issue.

My main concern is being able to reinstall LinuxMCE without losing all my Media!

Regards

[Marie.O]

Remember to make regular backups using web admin, so your pluto_main and pluto_media are backed up.

[sambuca]

Everybody has different priorities, so I might have stated the obvious. In my mind, people often focus on RAID for the wrong reasons.

RAID is not a replacement for proper backups, and thus is only really a way to improve the availability of a particular dataset. So only doing RAID on the media drive won't make much sense IMHO. I used to have RAID on my media too, and not on the system drive. Then I realized, if the system drive goes bad, I wont have access to my media anyway... (at least not without doing some hardware changes.) Should a media drive go bad, I'll just restore it from backup. It's even easy to restore the backup to another machine if I want to.

best regards,
sambuca

[fibres]

The trouble is how do you backup 6tb of media?

Hence why I like the idea of using a RAID 5 array. That way if a drive goes down I dont lose the data stored on the array.

Regards