Installing FreeBSD on Hardware Raid

[Valeri Galtsev]

On Tue, December 13, 2016 5:40 am, Luciano Mannucci wrote:
>
> Hello to everybody!
>
> I'm trying to install FreeBSD 10.3 (11.0 doesn't boot due to old EFI
> buggy implementation) on a 2010 Intel Server Board S5400SF machine,
> bearing an Intel Embedded Server RAID Technology II, with two arrays
> of SATA hard disks.
>
> When I boot the installation DVD of the 10.3-RELEASE, it sees the
> single disks instead of the arrays. It destroys the arrays if I let it
> write to the disks.

This pretty much is the behavior with fake RAID (aka software RAID).
Forget about on board "RAID" chip, install hardware RAID card, and y9ou
will have no problem. All my FreeBSD machine live on hardware RAIDs. Never
had any problem at all. I would recommend (in my preference order): 3ware,
LSI, Areca. Nether of these ever soiled their reputation by selling fake
RAID chips/cards. The first two are bought out (several times), and now
are owned bu the same Intel, but still go by their original brand name. I
strongly would recommend against any RAID cards by companies that also
sell fake RAID cards/chips. Their cards will not worth of what you will
pay for them, even if they indeed are hardware RAID and are cheaper than
cards from good guys I mentioned above.

I hope, this helps.

Valeri

>
> M$-Windows install straightforward without problems.
>
> I have'nt tried Linux yet.
>
> Thanks in advance to everybody for any help,
>
> Luciano.
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++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Valeri Galtsev
Sr System Administrator
Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics
Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics
University of Chicago
Phone: 773-702-4247
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