RAID on freebsd6.0 i386 or amd64

[bsduser]

i have a problem with getting freebsd to recognise the NVraid part of my setup , it will see the onboard Sillicon image 3114 controllor and the attached hard drives in raid stripe 0

however the NVRaid sata 2 controllor seems only to show a missmached bunch of devices that none of them relate to the stripe that is relavant

can anyone offer any ideas realting to this.

[Freaky]

What devices does it see? The relevent portions of a dmesg would be useful. Did you create the stripe using nVidia's BIOS configuration stuff, or via atacontrol(8)?

For what it's worth, you're probably better off using gmirror/gstripe than the on-board RAID stuff if at all possible.

[bsduser]

greetings...

firstly i have 4 hard drives in my system arranged as 2 seperate arrays , one is on a SIlicon image 3114 Sata150 controllor arranged in a stripe.
the second is NVraid controllor SATAII 300 with 2 hard drives arranged in a stripe

both stripes were prepared in the relavant hardware utility bios that are built in to the controllors, both controllors form part of the motherboard

here is the dmesg portions these were taken with camera as setup was started as there is no other way to bsd installed as yet.

pci0: <multimedia, audio> at device 4.0 (no driver attached)
atapci0: <nVidia nForce4 UDMA133 controller> port 0xfa00-0xfa0f,0x376,0x170-0x177,0x3f6,0x1f0-0x1f7 at device 6.0 on pci0
ata0:channel #0 on atapci0
ata1:channel #1 on atapci0
atapci1: <GENERIC ATA controller> port 0xf500-0xf50f,0xb73,0x970-0x977,0xbf0-0xbf3,0x9f0-0x9f7 irq 11 at device 7.0 on pci0
ata2:channel #0 on atapci1
ata3:channel #1 on atapci1
atapci2: <GENERIC ATA controller> port 0xf000-0xf00f,0xb60-0xb63,0x960-0x967,0xbe0-0xbe3,0x9e0-0x9e7 irq 5 at device 8.0 on pci0
ata4:channel #0 on atapci2
ata5:channel #1 on atapci2

........... Firewire etc section omitted ....
...................................

atapci3: <Sil 3114 SATA150 controller> port 0xda00-0xda0f,0sdb00-0xdb03,0xdc00-0xdc07, 0xdd00-0xdd03,0xde00-0xde07 mem0xfe8fd000-0xfe8fd3ff irq 17 at device 9.0 on pci1
ata6:channel #0 on atapci3
ata7:channel #1 on atapci3
ata8:channel #2 on atapci3
ata9:channel #3 on atapci3
pcib2: <ACPI PCI-PCI bridge> at device 12.0 on pci0
pci2: <ACPI PCI bus> on pcib2
........

acd0: DVDR <PIONEER DVD-RW DVR-109/1.40> at ata0-master PIO4
acd1: DVDROM <TSSTcorpDVD-ROM TS-H352A/TS03> at ata0-Slave PIO4
ad8: 190782MB <WDC WD2000JS-00MHB0/02.01C03> [387621/16/63] at ata4-master UDMA33
ad10: 190782MB <WDC WD2000JS-00MHB0/02.01C03> [387621/16/63] at ata5-master UDMA33
ad12: 114473MB <WDC WD1200JD-00GB0/02.05D02> [232581/16/63] at ata6-master SATA150
ad14: 114473MB <WDC WD1200JD-00GB0/02.05D02> [232581/16/63] at ata7-master SATA150



from this a few interesting points i cant work out firstly the
ad8 and ad10 are the hard drives attached to the nvraid controllor
ad12 and ad14 are the sil 3114 hard drives

bsd is seeing all hard drives seperate and no arrays

more interestingly when i get the Fdisk program to look at the drives as if i were to install on them, it shouldne see any partitions at all given that the raid stripe spreads the data across both drives , yet when i look at the first drive that has a 20 gig partition on it i see that partition as a NTFS partition, under normal circumstances i should not be able to see any partition that is raid when the array is not seen as a single drive

meaning i think that the way these onboard raid controllors spread data is not true raid , which lead to the question how does it get the data transfer speed up to where it is reeported by windows

but i think we are digressing here

please post your thoughts on this

[Freaky]

Yup, on-board cheapo RAID like this depends on the OS doing most of the work, with the BIOS helping out managing metadata and bootup. You might have more luck getting 6.1 to recognise your arrays.

Personally, I would install FreeBSD as normal to a single disk, then do something similar to what's described at http://people.freebsd.org/~rse/mirror/ to get the base system on a RAID-1 slice sized to taste (which you can boot off without any special BIOS support); you can then do what you like with the rest of the space; gstripe, gmirror, graid3, gvinum, gconcat, etc.

I'd also be looking at a PCI SATA controller to replace the SiI 3114; Silicon Image controllers are renound for their bugginess which only the Windows drivers seem able to work around effectively.

[bsduser]

Can you reccomend any ideal hardware that would do the job .

on another note something i jsut noticed.

when i booted off the install cd i selected safe mode to try and fix another problem
and SHOCK horror

it detected the Nv Raid arraay with no problem and i looked at it and all partitions are there and intact

it was detected as /dev/ar0

this would lead me to belive that tis a config issue stopping it working not somthing else

any thoughts on this

tho a nice 4 port pci raid controller natively supported would be nice but i cant find one in the hardware lists that suits

or at least one that doesnt cost £300

any ideas i appreciate this freaky ,

[Freaky]

Maybe try something from Promise; they're well supported in FreeBSD thanks to their openness about hardware documentation.