> On Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 12:05 PM, <[email protected]> wrote: >> Since receiving your email I decided to boot into Windows and run an >> array >> synchronization in the Nvidia Mediashield software. > > Yeech... > > This sounds extremely dangerous. Are you doing whole-drive raid 5 or > are you only raiding individual partitions? > > In general, with linux you need to use either pure software raid or > pure hardware raid. What you have on your motherboard is best > described as hardware assisted software raid, which is a sort of > hybrid thing. > > What you've described doesn't make much sense to me. If this raid is > being maintained by Windows software, then there's no way to make > linux see or use this raid short of running the linux environment > inside a virtual machine hosted by Windows. > > If I had such a board, I'd configure the bios as JBOD and do a pure > linux software raid. >
With the exception of grub and my initrd being in a small non-RAID drive, all of my various Windows and Linux partitions are part of the single RAID 5 array. This MB uses NVIDIA nForce® 570 SLI MCP supporting: - 1 x Ultra DMA 133 / 100 / 66 / 33 - 6 x Serial ATA 3.0Gb/s - NVIDIA MediaShield RAID supports RAID 0 1 0+1 5 and JBOD span cross Serial ATA drives JMicron JMB363 SATA controller supports: - 1 x Internal Serial ATA 3.0Gb/s - 1 x External Serial ATA 3.0Gb/s port on back I/O (SATA On-the-Go) - Support RAID 0 1 and JBOD Note that RAID 5 seems dependant on the NVIDIA MediaShield controller. What I don't understand is what does the linux dmraid4-5 module do? Is any maintenance of the array handled by the dmraid4-5 module? What does my bios manage as part of all this? For example that is where I chose the Nvidia in place of the JMicron controller. I have little understanding of the difference between them. If maintenance of the array is required, i.e. synchronization for example, how often should this be done? If it means that I have to boot into Winblows once a month for manual maintenance, that doesnt really bother me. Can this maintenance of the array be done from within Linux even if the Windows NTFS partition is part of the same array? Understand that I am not really interested in completely rebuilding my box here unless someone tells me that I have no other option to make things work. I am more likely to give up on the MVPs before I do that if absolutely necessary. I did consider adding a hardware RAID card, but at $550+ Ill likely pick another solution. A few parties have mentioned Linux software RAID. I strongly suspect that I would need to give up the dual boot scenario to do that (not a really big deal on its own). More importantly I would likely need to completely reinstall my Linux OS, and all the various requirements of Mythtv and other related software which is months or years of ongoing effort for a non-expert like myself. I am hopeful that someone can give me some positive insight on the issues on what I need to do to maintain my existing arrangement. Thx! Scott ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Mvpmc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/mvpmc-users mvpmc wiki: http://mvpmc.wikispaces.com/
