RAID 1 question/concern

[rudi]

RAID 1 question/concern [SOLVED]

Hello. I turned an old Compaq D500 PC into my first NAS box using FreeNAS.

It has two SATA II 500GB Hitachi hard drives and a SATA controller card --> (VANTEC 4-Port SATA 150 PCI Combo Host Card w/RAID Model UGT-ST320R)


I have setup RAID 1 on the controller for the hard drives. I mirrored (copied) the source drive to the target drive successfully.

Here is my question/concern...

When I got into FreeNAS and go to add the volume, it sees the hard drives as two separate drives and not one drive. Is this normal? Am I doing something wrong?

If this is normal, I would just choose the source hard drive only to put data on, as my controller would mirror it the target, correct?

 

[fracai]

I can't speak to the behavior of the controller, but it's generally recommended to disable the RAID controller and let ZFS handle your drives.

 

[rudi]

i dont have enough memory in the system for ZFS so thats not a solution for me.

 

[cyberjock]

Per the manual you should consider using UFS or waiting until you can build a system with more than 4GB of RAM.

 

[rudi]

I understand I need to use UFS. I am aware of that. I am not trying to use ZFS at all, RAID or not.

My question pertains to to RAID 1 within FreeNAS and seeing it as two disc and not one disc. In RAID 1, you create a mirror with TWO disc. Those two disc are built as a SET. A whole. So why am I seeing TWO disk in FreeNAS and not ONE disc. That is my question. Not UFS not ZFS. None of that matters.

 

[pirateghost]

I understand I need to use UFS. I am aware of that. I am not trying to use ZFS at all, RAID or not.

My question pertains to to RAID 1 within FreeNAS and seeing it as two disc and not one disc. In RAID 1, you create a mirror with TWO disc. Those two disc are built as a SET. A whole. So why am I seeing TWO disk in FreeNAS and not ONE disc. That is my question. Not UFS not ZFS. None of that matters.

because 99% of the ''RAID'' you see on motherboards is FakeRAID, SoftwareRAID, and completely useless to linux/bsd systems....

aka

FAKERAID doesnt work without installing proprietary drivers

 

[joeschmuck]

Since that PCI card supports RAID and the FreeNAS is detecting two drives, I'd say you didn't configure the RAID in the card properly as my first guess. If you did configure it properly then it probably isn't that great of a card. Keep in mind that if you ever have your PCI Raid card fail, you will have no access to your data until you can install a card that is generally the exact same manufacturer and generally the same model. This is one major benefit to having a software RAID in FreeNAS.

 

[pirateghost]

From the manual:
Silicon Image SiI3512 SATA controller chip

which means its FAKERAID....not a true RAID card at all. any linux/bsd system will see a 'RAID' configured on that card as individual drives.

 

[rudi]

Thanks guys. The info I was needing. Yes I did configure the RAID correctly, even followed the instructions per their website. It also seems its a driver issue as well. I'm just going to do a simple 1 drive data disk and replication by other means onto the other disk. create a simple backup script.

Thanks!

 

[pirateghost]

CRONJOB (set to run every n hours or minutes or whatever you want the replication to occur):

Code:

rsync -rvuAth --log-file=/path/to/newfile.log /path/to/data/* /path/to/backup/location/

if you have thousands of files you might want to purge that log file every so often, or set the script to create an incremental log for every rsync