On 03/05/16 11:30, Chris Walker wrote:
I have been given a new(ish) PC. It's an i7 with 16GB of RAM. It currently has Windows 10 on a 128 GB SSD and has a couple of 1TB hard drives configured under Windows as RAID1 - they show up in the BIOS as RAID.
There's two ways of implementing RAID: Via hardware or via software. If it's showing in the BIOS as raid, that suggests to me that it's being implemented via hardware, unless the bios is smart enough to detect a software raid system.
If it's done via hardware, then I would guess that it will "just work" under linux, as the hardware will take all the strain of synchronising disk writes & reads etc. However, it might be the case that some sort of driver or something might be required to make it work under linux, and it may not understand linux file systems, which may mean that you have to keep using NTFS. I know linux can use NTFS, but I don't think the support for it is wonderful - I could be wrong though. I expect there will be software tools to help maintain the raid - add a new disk, force "fail" a faulty disk, rebuild the array etc. These may all be stored somewhere in the bios, or they may be external programs. If they are external programs, it is very likely that they will only run under WIndows. If that is the case, then if something goes wrong, you're stuffed if you don't have a working copy of windows on this machine.
If the raid is implemented under software, I don't know but I suspect that it won't be in a format that Linux software raid will understand and work with. I very much doubt that you'll have any joy with a Windows Software Raid.
I'm fairly sure that I was told when I set up raid, that it's basically best to use Linux Software Raid. Unless you're using some specialised server hardware, software raid is likely to be about as fast as a hardware raid system, but more importantly, you set it all up under linux, using linux tools, and a linux environment. If something goes wrong, you use linux to fix it. LINUX FTW*!
(*YMMV)
My intention is to remove the SSD and replace it with a 512GB SSD so that I can have Mageia 5 on it as well (that's the distro I have run for some time and I'm familiar with it). My question concerns the Windows RAID. Does anybody have any idea what linux will make of it?
If it helps, I've pulled the drive out and hooked it to my current machine via a USB adapter and it appears that it's a regular NTFS drive. But should there be any extra partitions or files on it to denote that it's part of a RAID array?
Probably, but how to find out? You'll have to look at any raid documentation that comes with the machine. If it's BIOS based, then don't expect much help as BIOS documentation is usually poor English and lacking in depth in my experience.
I also intend to have my /home partition on a separate 1TB drive. The installation on this machine has Windows 10 on a 500GB hard drive with Mageia on a 1TB drive. I'm thinking that I might just bung that drive in to the new machine and at some point remove the extra partitions from it leaving just the /home on there.
Once I've installed Mageia on the new SSD, is it as simple as amending the fstab file to point to that 1TB drive?
Could be. Tip. When adding/removing disks, drive letters will change sometimes necessitating changing the fstab to accomodate this. Consequently, they added a feature to fstab to allow you to identify the drive and partition using the UUID (Unique Unit Identifier) - basically a ID code for the partition. As long as you don't reformat the partition, the ID should remain the same. Consequently if you use fstab to say that the /home partition is in UUID=YXZ, then it will find it irrespective of drive letter, (sda1, sda2, sdb1, sdb2 etc).
Or should I do something different altogether?
Do you need raid? I have it. It adds reliability, but it also adds complexity. I wish I'd formatted my disks differently as I have partitions of a particular size. I gather that you can use LVM (Logical Volume Management) for more flexible partition control, but I have no idea how.
Good luck. Steve