raid controller

[CLIFFORD ILKAY]

On October 4, 2005 13:52, Phillip Qin wrote:
> I have an onboard SATA raid controller. I plan to use RAID-1 on two
> 400GB HDDs. If I replace/upgrade my motherboard, will I lose data
> on the raid drives?

I will second what Lennart wrote and can cite first-hand experience 
with the problem of using hardware RAID. I have a couple of servers 
that use the MegaRAID controller. MegaRAID is not exactly uncommon. I 
had Linux running on both of those machines at one time or another, 
one a Dell, the other an HP, both fully supporting the drives that 
were created by the hardware controller. They were both long overdue 
for a refresh so rather than do an upgrade and preserve the same disk 
formatting, I wanted to do a fresh installation with LVM so that I 
could have some flexibility. No matter which distro I tried, no 
current version would detect the drives created by the hardware RAID 
controller. It turns out there was a change in the megaraid module 
after the 2.6.9 version of the kernel. The same module no longer 
supports the older hardware. So, I blew away the hardware RAID sets, 
disabled the RAID controllers completely, and used Linux software 
RAID and LVM. Software RAID is not likely to change to the point 
where you will not be able to see the drives that were created by 
older versions whereas apparently, hardware RAID support can change 
for the worse over time.
-- 
Regards,

Clifford Ilkay
Dinamis Corporation
3266 Yonge Street, Suite 1419
Toronto, ON
Canada  M4N 3P6

+1 416-410-3326
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