# FreeBSD gw 7.2-RELEASE-p4 and FastTrak TX2300



## dextro_ (Aug 7, 2010)

I have a Promise FastTrak TX2300 configured for 2 drives to RAID1 but when I boot FreeBSD gw 7.2-RELEASE-p4 it shows both the drives. When I boot into Windows it only shows the one ideas?


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## mav@ (Aug 7, 2010)

Not sure about that controller, but generally FreeBSD ataraid driver doesn't hides original drives. It just adds array device "arX".


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## katta (Aug 12, 2010)

Hi everyone! I've got another problem with similar FastTrak100 TX2 controller. System perfectly boots up with a clean controller, but fails to boot after read loader.conf (halts, but sometimes throws endless stream of hexadecimal values to the console) when there is a RAID-0 array on the controller. I've tried it with FreeBSD 6.1, FreeBSD 7.2, FreeBSD 8.0, and FreeBSD 8.1, and no one of them was boot up. I've searched for solution, but found nothing.


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## phoenix (Aug 12, 2010)

Don't use the "RAID" features of these controllers, as they are not real, hardware RAID controllers.  You are better off configuring the controllers as non-RAID, and using software RAID in the OS (gmirror, gstripe, graid3, zfs, etc).


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## katta (Aug 12, 2010)

Interesting... how do they works then? I've just try to configure controller in non-RAID mode, but it seems it doesn't support such mode. I can't use internal IDE controller because it's too slow. What can i do?


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## phoenix (Aug 12, 2010)

The controller puts a little bit of metadata onto the individual drives that says "part of RAID1 array".  Then the OS loads a driver that reads that metadata and builds the *arX* device ... and it's the driver that does all the RAID functionality.  IOW, it's a software RAID implementation.  But, due to the metadata that is used, it's a software RAID implementation that is unique to that controller.  Which means, if the controller dies, you need to replace it with the exact same controller.  If you use gmirror, though, you can move the drives around to any controller and still access the data.

If the controller won't let you configure JBOD or non-RAID modes, then create multiple RAID0 arrays using 1 drive per array.  Or, just don't create any RAID arrays at all.  FreeBSD will still see the individual disks.


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