I have a Gigabyte board with an nForce 430 chipset that supports RAID. I was hoping to use it to create a simple RAID1 mirror using two hard drives to protect my previous MP3 collection. The system in question is an updated Kubuntu Gutsy box.
Before we start, this is the first time I am playing with RAID and the information below might very well be wrong. Please feel free to correct me :)
First of all, onboard RAIDs on cheap motherboards, while they may appear to be hardware, are not really. They are apparently software solutions masquerading as hardware OS-agnostic solutions. From what I've read, all they do is to display a BIOS-like RAID management screen at boot-up where you can create and delete arrays. Rebuilding the array, which IMHO is kind of the point of the exercise, is also an option. However, all this option does is to set a bit that states that a drive is to be rebuilt. After that, it's up to your OS and related applications to do the heavy lifting. Doesn't sound very appealing, does it?
Article curtailed: I was using this page to write down many of the issues I was facing while setting up dmraid, and frankly, I have given up and am not prepared to risk my data on something so unreliable and hard to setup. I have therefore snipped all the information that was on here as I reckon it would have served more to confuse rather than guide. My apologies :(
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