On Tue, 10 May 2016 09:41:01 +0100 Laurie Brown laurie@brownowl.com wrote:
On 10/05/16 09:19, steve-ALUG@hst.me.uk wrote:
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.
[SNIP]
Most on-board RAIDs are "fake RAID", and Linux generally doesn't play nicely with them - to be fair, it doesn't need to. The RAID part is handled by the BIOS and some drivers. The disks are just plain old disks and will appear (I strongly suspect) to Linux as just that; two ordinary drives.
Separate "proper" hardware RAID cards behave differently, and aren't "fake RAID".
If it were me, and I knew that Windows would never need to see these drives in their raw state (Samba would be ok, for instance) then I would blow them away and use software RAID with mdadm on Linux. Then they need to be set up as type fd (Linux RAID auto), and Linux will see them as RAID and behave accordingly.
I think the key there is 'blow them away'. As you will see from my reply to Steve, I'm pretty much convinced that I don't need the existing RAID on there so it will go.
I'll report back to let you know how it all went.