[mdlug] nVidia SATA BIOS RAID

[Michael ORourke]

I was thinking the same thing, but so far I haven't found anything yet.  I probably should have done a little more research before using the nVidia drivers.


-----Original Message-----
>From: "Wojtak, Greg" <GregWojtak at quickenloans.com>
>Sent: Feb 24, 2010 7:50 AM
>To: MDLUG's Main discussion list <mdlug at mdlug.org>
>Subject: Re: [mdlug] nVidia SATA BIOS RAID
>
>I've not used the nVidia RAID controller myself, but with other RAID controllers (Dell PERC, HP cciss), there were utilities that you could build and run that queried the device directly to get statistics and status.  Perhaps nVidia has something similar.
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: mdlug-bounces at mdlug.org [mailto:mdlug-bounces at mdlug.org] On Behalf Of Michael ORourke
>Sent: Tuesday, February 23, 2010 11:24 PM
>To: MDLUG's Main discussion list
>Subject: [mdlug] nVidia SATA BIOS RAID
>
>I have a Dell desktop system that I put into service as a server.
>It has 3 SATA 640GB drives.
>2 of the drives are setup as RAID1 leveraging the nVidia BIOS.  As you can see below, the system recognizes the RAID volume for /boot (notice the strange device name it assigns), the other filesystems (not shown) are under LVM control or standard partitioning (e.g. /dev/sdc1).  Also, there is a sata_nv driver that is loaded.
>
>mike at serv1:~> df -h /boot
>Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
>/dev/mapper/nvidia_feggjfad_part1
>                       69M   20M   46M  30% /boot
>
>mike at serv1:~> lsmod | grep sata
>sata_nv                21588  4
>libata                161216  1 sata_nv
>
>My question is simply, how do I query the status of the RAID set from the OS?  Since it is not actually software raid, I can't query /proc/mdstat.  I've poked around /proc quite a bit, but can't seem to find anything that looks helpful.  The OS can definetly see all 3 drives.
>
>serv1:/proc/scsi # cat /proc/scsi/scsi
>Attached devices:
>Host: scsi0 Channel: 00 Id: 00 Lun: 00
>  Vendor: ATA      Model: WDC WD6401AALS-0 Rev: 01.0
>  Type:   Direct-Access                    ANSI  SCSI revision: 05
>Host: scsi1 Channel: 00 Id: 00 Lun: 00
>  Vendor: ATA      Model: WDC WD6401AALS-0 Rev: 01.0
>  Type:   Direct-Access                    ANSI  SCSI revision: 05
>Host: scsi2 Channel: 00 Id: 00 Lun: 00
>  Vendor: TSSTcorp Model: CDRWDVD TS-H493A Rev: D200
>  Type:   CD-ROM                           ANSI  SCSI revision: 05
>Host: scsi3 Channel: 00 Id: 00 Lun: 00
>  Vendor: ATA      Model: WDC WD6401AALS-0 Rev: 01.0
>  Type:   Direct-Access                    ANSI  SCSI revision: 05
>
>So it's not masking the devices from the OS (like some hardware raid controlers might).  From the Google searches that I have done, the nVidia Bios RAID is what is commonly referred to as "fake RAID".  Not a true hardware RAID implementation.  The good news is the OS does recognize the RAID volume that I created from the BIOS, but it would be very helpful to have some sort of utility to query the status of the RAID.
>
>Anybody use this driver (sata_nv) and/or have some suggestions?
>
>-Mike
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