ICH5R SATA RAID?

Doug Ambrisko ambrisko at ambrisko.com
Wed Apr 7 07:16:18 PDT 2004


Kenneth D. Merry writes:
| On Tue, Apr 06, 2004 at 20:29:10 -0700, Doug Ambrisko wrote:
| > I have a SuperMicro system that does the Intel "ICH5-R" RAID.
| > I should get inspired via the Linux code and see if I can add
| > that.  So far I've haved setup the RAID but have turned on the ICH
| > flag.
| 
| Adaptec HostRAID is software RAID.  By software RAID, I mean that you only
| get BIOS support from the card for booting, and after that all of the RAID
| functionality is handled via the host OS.
| 
| Some of their SCSI controllers include HostRAID support.  e.g.:
| 
| http://www.adaptec.com/worldwide/product/proddetail.html?sess=no&language=English+US&prodkey=ASC-39320A-R&cat=%2fTechnology%2fUltra320%2fNew+Ultra320+SCSI!

The ICH stuff is not SCSI.  There was no mention of Adaptec in the
manual for this motherboard.  There were other SuperMicro boards that
had SCSI controllers on them but this one and the one I have do not.
They just have SATA ports that can do RAID.

| If the ICH5-R chip on the Supermicro motherboard in question has Adaptec
| HostRAID BIOS, you would need support somewhere, either in the ATA code or
| in Vinum or another RAID stack for reading the metadata and doing I/O to
| the array.

ata-raid works fairly well and is simple compared to other implementations.

| There is Linux code to read the metadata here:
| 
| http://people.freebsd.org/~gibbs/linux/SRC/emd-0.8.0-tar.gz
| 
| And an older version here:
| 
| http://people.freebsd.org/~ken/linux/md.html
| 
| The metadata code in both drivers is dual licensed (BSD and GPL licenses),
| so you could grab the metadata headers and use them to write support for it
| for FreeBSD.

I'll take a look at it but I'm not sure if this is the same format or
different.

Thanks,

Doug A.


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