Arch Linux

snafle

Member

Registered: 2008-04-08

Posts: 41

Best RAID controller for use with Arch and Windows

I'm after a hardware raid controller, to dual boot Arch and Windows off the same array. Price is not so much of an issue, but below £200 would be nice. Can anyone recomend a good one, or tell me what to look for? It's quite confusing.

Basically it needs to present the array to the OS (windows/linux) as a single disc, so I can dual boot. Thanks for any help.

Last edited by snafle (2008-04-20 13:33:16)

loosec

Member

Registered: 2007-03-08

Posts: 134

Re: Best RAID controller for use with Arch and Windows

You should be fine with a fake-raid controller aswell althou true hardware raid is more cool.
You might want to take a peek here to get more info on chipsets and their drivers.

You will need to use dmraid in linux and the regular raid driver for windows.

You also only need true hardware raid if you plan on using raid-5, 6 or the likes to compute checksums otherwise fake-raid will be fine.

QuimaxW

Member

From: Papua New Guinea

Registered: 2006-12-03

Posts: 228

Website

Re: Best RAID controller for use with Arch and Windows

3Ware cards are nice, don't know the prices though. Be warned about any "cheap" raid card, they are mostly software or fake-raid cards.

I don't know about the latest kernel, but in the past I had bad experiences with fake-raid and dual boot. It seemed that linux wouldn't honor the fake-raid as a raid, but saw through the controller and gave two single drives (RAID1). Even after it was working, every time Windows booted it flagged the array as degraded.

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"He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose." -Jim Elliot

snafle

Member

Registered: 2008-04-08

Posts: 41

Re: Best RAID controller for use with Arch and Windows

Thanks for your replies- I'm going to try using fake-raid, it'll hopefully work. If it doesn't, well, I'll have to deal with it.

samoturk

Member

From: Ljubljana, Slovenia

Registered: 2007-02-12

Posts: 86

Re: Best RAID controller for use with Arch and Windows

I'm using 3ware 3WARE ESCALADE 9650SE with 4 sata ports. It costs 360€ here in Slovenia. It works great and I'm really pleased with it. All 3ware controllers are supported by vanilla linux kernel (windows support should be also OK). If you are looking for great hardware controller go for 3ware.