In short, almost everything in the 2nd post here is wrong. Fake raid is like a software raid that you can boot directly off of, but thats about it. Its always, to my knowledge, better to do disk striping or raid 1 in windows. May 30, 2015 i did a lot of reading on this and kind of conclude software and the fake hardware aka bios raid on my chipset are not really useful. Two caveats here are that most fake raid solutions, are limited to at most raid 0, raid 1, raid 10, raid 5, and raid 50. For giggles, i used the fake raid software to put those two hard drives in a raid 1 array, but esxi 5. Despite the terminology, fake raid via dmraid is a robust software. Would it not be faster to remove the card, and set up software raid with mdadm. The w7 software raid doesnt seem to notify the user when a disk fails. Raid is implemented in software using proprietary drivers written by the manufacturer. The only way that fake raid stresses the chipset is from the io, nothing more, nothing less. Hardware raid is the more popular type, at least in terms of mindshare, with hardware raid controllers being nearly ubiquitous in pc platform servers. All the processing is done by your cpu and is similar to software raid in that regard.
How i learned to stop worrying and love software raid. Now fakeraid is semisupported on a xenserver installation meaning you can fake raid a storage repository, but not the entire host. Does fake raid offer any advantage over software raid. With software fake the writes may also be parallel, but it depends on the io controllers and drivers supporting this it is more likely with software raid if your drives are not all on the same controller, so again there is potential for fake raid to actually be a little slower in that circumstance. Users generally refer to fakeraid when referring to products such as the intel ich10r, amd sb850, and various marvell products as another example where raid mirroring, striping, and parity calculations occur through software powered by the host systems cpu. Is it possible to fix this on production servers without risking to. This includes operating systems, software raid controllers, backup software, file organisational software, encoding and playback software, and anything else you use to become the smaug.
Transferring files from a wd black 2tb to the raid 1 array is going at an appallingly slow rate of around 60mbs. As we mentioned earlier, on a level 1 raid two disks have the exact copy of all the data at any single moment. Intel chipset raid is not fake raid, its hardware raid. Not all fake raids are labelled with one of those, but itll catch probably 90% of them. This wiki describes how to get linux to see the raid as one disk and boot from it in the same way that windows will install on this type of device. But i would like to know if there is a way to check from the. Fakeraidhowto community help wiki ubuntu documentation. Your highpoint raid is a hardware raid, nothing fake about it. So, when one of the drives fails because hdd failure is a matter of time all data is safe on the other disk. So could i do a software raid 5 of 18 tb total 3x 6 tb.
If its not supported in later kernels and you want to do a software raid, remove the card from your system and attach the drives either to the existing connections or you may have to get an expansion card to connect your drives, if theyre either scsi or ide etc. Stay away from ich10r type raid solutions fake raid. Ubuntu isnt automatically understanding the raid volume. Any cacheless onboard raid controller is a near useless fake raid, made gluing together a satasas controller and said opaque driver.
Bios raid bios raid also known asquasihardware raid is a form of software raid for which the raid configuration is managed in part or in full by the storage controllers bios but which is not true hardware raid. It mobo fails, you get recover array from another intel chipset raid. I have to logon as root and use that stupid bash script every boot. Jul 03, 20 i have esxi running from the 1st hd on a machine. Socalled fake raid is a name commonly applied to motherboard bios raid features that provide the bare minimum for raid functionality as it is understood. Oh, thats not good news for me as i have several servers in production running like this. So in the software of the controller i configured the first 2 disks in raid. Citrix xenserver raid fakeraidsoftware raid by swicknire on sep.
For raid 5 or 6, parity calculations are still done on the cpu in this configuration. If a hardware raid controller is not capable of nesting linear jbod with raid n, then linear jbod can be achieved. Fakeraid ends up being the worst possible scenario for raid because it comes with all of the normal caveats of software raid, adds in the obvious problems caused by confusion and misunderstanding by the system administrators and has to do poor techniques in order to hide itself as a system driver which is the worst model for software raid. Fake hardware raid is based on proprietary software and the format of the raid array depends on the controller. Im planning either 2x1tb in software raid 1, or i could use 3x1tb or 500gb in raid 5. An improvement in costeffectiveness because lowerpriced disks are used in large numbers. Not a software or fakeraid, but a full hardware raid that looks like a normal nonraid disk. Also, the multiple drive writes issue exists in either case to write to a block on a twodrive raid1 for instance means two writes by the os to the controller with. Differences between hardware raid, hbas, and software raid. It is a firmware, rather than hardware or software, raid system. I have a bash script i run as root as soon as i get a prompt. Here we will discuss about raid 1 which is also known as disk mirroring.
Issues related to applications and software problems. Fake raid is essentially software raid provided by the bios on the motherboard, however, it has none of the benefits of software raid and none of the benefits of hardware raid, hence, fake raid. Performance not important, but from a recovery standpoint. The read is the same as having one disk under software raid and it even states this on apples site os x uses software raid as well. The difference in reliability could be massive though, with windows being the safe one. Regular raid 1, as provided by linux software raid, does not stripe reads, but can perform reads in parallel. If you have two hard drives in raid 1, then data will be. Fake raid hardware raid is exactly what it sounds like a special hardware controller card manages the disks to provide the striping andor redundancy.
As important as the drives that you put data on and the hardware you control them with, is the software you read, write, and organise your data with. Fake raid rarely supports any raid levels other than 0 or 1. Hardware raid controller haben im gegensatz zu software raid meistens einen eingebauten cache haufig 512 mb oder. Matrix raid is a computer storage technology marketed by intel. This time im trying to install a server using hardware configured raid 1. You can then set up linux software raid with mdadm. Also, it only discusses how to setup a raid array for arbitrary storage.
Jun, 2016 many hypervisors, including vmware, do not offer software raid. Today, most motherboards have builtin raid but not necessarily every raid configuration see below. So when intrepid tries to create a software raid, out of these 4 drives, it fails, due to the reason that one layer of software raid is already there created by asus. Raid uses two or more physical drives and a raid controller, which is plugged into motherboards that do not have raid circuits. Raid 1 works great under mdadm and there is nothing wrong with it, there is just no read performance increase, at least from what ive seen.
Linux software raid uses a format of its own to store raid configuration information the socalled metadata. That said, linux software raid is more robust and better supported and thus. Raid redundant array of inexpensive disks or drives, or redundant array of independent disks is a data storage virtualization technology that combines multiple physical disk drive components into one or more logical units for the purposes of data redundancy, performance improvement, or both. Comparing hardware raid vs software raid setups deals with how the storage drives in a raid array connect to the motherboard in a server or pc, and the management of those drives. Sep 14, 2009 fakeraid is that of an onboard or bios type raid. The key advantage of a full, dedicated hardware raid is that it requires no software or drivers. Recovery is easy if one drive fails with raid 1 as each drive can be accessed independently of the array. The differences between any two software implementations are going to be nominal in performance. Rear does not support raid 1 mdraid intel imsmrst based. Echte hardware raid controller besitzen einen eigenen prozessor fur. Still, hardwaresoftware raid should provide some performance advantage over full software raid. Unfortunately, i have a very, very strong suspicion that this is a fake raid card as it is not from any of the main manufacturers like lsi or 3ware.
So when intrepid tries to create a software raid, out of these 4. I wanted to raid 1 the other two hard drives, but couldnt since i dont have hardware raid. Fake raid rarely supports hot spares or hot swappable drives. With software raid 1, instead of two physical disks, data can be mirrored between volumes on a single disk.
Lowend raid cards get lumped in to this category because they may not offer the same dram cache. Its lone advantage over pure software raid is the ability to present a single device for bios booting. To solve the problem asus raid configuration needed to be wiped out, and the raid option in bios for satascsi should be disabled. That said, linux software raid is more robust and better supported and thus, recommended over fakeraid if you do not need to dual boot with windows. Oct 26, 2017 instead, they are simply multichannel disk controllers combined with special bios configuration options and software drivers to assist the os in performing raid operations. Your best bet is to buy a decent addon raid card, or just use software raid. This was in contrast to the previous concept of highly reliable mainframe disk drives referred to as. Mar 26, 2020 in this tutorial, well be talking about raid, specifically we will set up software raid 1 on a running linux distribution.
However, the changes will likely be slight in any case. Fake hardware raid is based on proprietary software and the format of the raid array depends on the controller actually the bios firmware on the controller. When i bought my motherboard, the asrock conroexfireesata2, one of the big selling points was an on board raid, however some research revealed that rather than being a true hardware raid controller, this was in fact more than likely what is know as fake raid. In this series, well walk through raid concepts and terminology, create software raid arrays using linuxs mdadm utility, and learn how to manage and administer arrays to keep your storage infrastructure running smoothly. Please note that with a software implementation, the raid 1 level is the only. It is used in modern gnulinux distributions in place of older software raid utilities such as raidtools2 or raidtools. That basically means that i use a fake raid hardware controller or a. It is used in modern gnulinux distributions in place of older software raid utilities such as raidtools2 or raidtools mdadm is free software maintained by, and ed to, neil brown of suse, and licensed under the terms of version 2 or later of the gnu general public license. This gives the appearance of a hardware raid, because the raid configuration is done using a bios setup screen, and the operating system can be booted from the raid. Unfortunately, i have a very, very strong suspicion that this is a fakeraid card as it is not from any of the main manufacturers like lsi or 3ware. Raid 1 consists of data mirroring, without parity or striping. Software raid 1, or mirroring, makes an exact copy of all the data between two disks. Fake raid systems routinely have issues with performance and reliability. In a hardware raid setup, the drives connect to a special raid controller inserted in a fast pciexpress pcie slot in a motherboard.
Whilst the new code handling the raid io still runs in the kernel, devicemapper is generally. Despite the terminology, fake raid via dmraid is a robust software raid implementation that offers a solid system to mirror or stripe data across multiple disks with negligible overhead for any modern system. Software raid 1 in windows 7 for increased data security. Back when all of our server storage was on scsi disks, i used to be pretty particular about using good. With raid 0 being useless for data security and raid 5 being unavailable, creating a software raid 1 in windows 7 is the only viable option. I wonder how bad it is, does this need to be redone urgently.
How to set up software raid 1 on an existing linux distribution. Or, go on ebay and look for old hardware raid controllers. Yes, a minimum of two disks is required for raid 1 hardware implementations. Second all operating systems can access each others raid partitions if they have drivers. Fakeraid article about fakeraid by the free dictionary.
Raid is a data storage virtualization technology that combines multiple physical disk drive. In this circumstance, unless your motherboard has actual hardware raid not the standard fake hardware raid you are much better off sticking with w7 raid. While, in theory, a third party software raid package is a reasonable option, the reality of the software raid market is that essentially all quality software raid implementations are native components of either the operating system itself linux, mac osx, solaris. I have installed gentoo many times over, but usually install using software raid md and lvm. These instructions only discuss the last form of raid. Was thinking, would a windows software raid 1 be preferable to an intel chipset fake raid.
Firmware and software raid differ from hardware raid in that the array is ultimately managed by the operating system instead of a dedicated. In the past, raid was also accomplished by software only but was much slower. Dec 19, 2019 raid 0 consists of striping, but no mirroring or parity. With hardware raid all raid processing is handled by a dedicated raid processor separate from the cpu with its own memory and often with its own cache. Linux software raid can also support the creation of standard raid 0, raid 1, raid 4, raid 5 and raid 6 configurations. Im sorta a n00b, so i hope im posting in the correct place. Fake hardware raid is based on proprietary software and the. There are very few motherboards with decent raid controllers builtin, though. Fake raid is nothing more than a software raid done via a proprietary binary driverblob. Fake raid article about fake raid by the free dictionary. Hardware raid controllers appear in this list, but fakeraid implementations do. That is not the case with fake raid hardware cards that use a combination of special hardware and software to manage the disks.
With softwarefake the writes may also be parallel, but it depends on the io controllers and drivers supporting this it is more likely with software raid if your drives are not all on the same controller, so again there is potential for fake raid to actually be a little slower in that circumstance. Running raid or not makes no difference to the chipset. Apr 14, 2016 with raid 0 being useless for data security and raid 5 being unavailable, creating a software raid 1 in windows 7 is the only viable option. With modern 2tb and 3tb drives, double parity protection schemes such as raid 6 become both practical and arguably necessary over single parity raid 4 and raid 5 implementations.
These have shown up in a number of desktopworkstation motherboards. A very important fact to remember about fake raid is that the implementation varies from motherboard to motherboard. So in the software of the controller i configured the first 2 disks in raid 1. Ubuntu community is straight up about the fact that in the last few years, a number of hardware products have come onto the market claiming to be ide or sata raid controllers.
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