# Hardware RAID



## captainoi1 (Nov 8, 2009)

Hi everybody..
This is the first time i post here.

I'm setting up Freebsd 7.2 with Hardware RAID. It is SIL 680.
On the RAID card BIOS i already configured 2 hard disk to be on RAID 1.
However, when booted to Freebsd and using ATACONTROL, i found only 1 drive connected and the RAID was degraded.

Is there any mistake i done on configuring the raid?
AFAIK, if i configured on RAID card, i shouldnt do any configuration on freebsd. 

the hard disk is 80GB MAXTOR and WD running on PATA.
Please help me.


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## captainoi1 (Nov 9, 2009)

Hi again

 Right now, i can assured that the raid running on software RAID.
dmesg captured 


```
ar0 :76319MB <FreeBSD PseudoRAID RAID1> Status :Ready
```

is there any steps which i forgot/left?
Come on, must be a lot of FreeBSD users over here running hardware raid.


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## User23 (Nov 9, 2009)

Hi, 

please read


```
man atacontrol


NAME
     atacontrol -- ATA device driver control program

SYNOPSIS
     atacontrol <command> args

     atacontrol attach channel
     atacontrol detach channel
     atacontrol reinit channel
     atacontrol create type [interleave] disk0 ... diskN
     atacontrol delete raid
     atacontrol addspare raid disk
     atacontrol rebuild raid
     atacontrol status raid
     atacontrol mode device
     atacontrol info channel
     atacontrol cap device
     atacontrol list
```

If you type


```
atacontrol status ar0
```

you should get the status of your ATARAID.

---

What says the controller BIOS about the raid array? Is it degraded there too?


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## captainoi1 (Nov 9, 2009)

It didnt say anything. 
Btw, i have to configure manually using atacontrol to get the RAID working. 
raid bios say the raid is raid 1.


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## User23 (Nov 9, 2009)

If you set it up manually you dont need any settings in the controller BIOS.

Please post the output of: 





> atacontrol list



Problem is, you have Silicon Image chip on the controller.

manual for ataraid says:



> The ataraid driver can read the following metadata formats:
> 
> o   Adaptec HostRAID
> o   Highpoint V2 RocketRAID
> ...



According to that FreeBSD can not write any metadata to your controller.

Did you have important data already on this array or can you still play around with it?

I was running into problems with that Sil680 to on FreeBSD 6.0 using ataraid long time ago. For myself i would never use that cheap pseudo ata raid implementation again. I would prefer to use gmirror sw raid or if you have enough RAM maybe using ZFS.


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## phoenix (Nov 9, 2009)

Note:  this is *NOT* a hardware RAID controller.  This is a pseudo-RAID controller, where all of the RAID functionality is in the driver, and not on the card itself.  As such, you will get better usage out of this if you disable all RAID functionality on the card, and use gmirror(8), graid3(8), or zfs(8).

Anything managed by the ataraid(4) driver is not a real hardware RAID controller.


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## captainoi1 (Nov 10, 2009)

Ok man,
Understood.

will configure s/w raid later.


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