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Hi Archers...
So hopefully someone knows a bit about Intel IMSM and mdadm and the hardware.
I have a ASUS zenbook UX301LAA (awesome laptop) which comes with 2 x 256G SSD and (firmware) raid0 configured out the box.
After I bought the laptop, I booted arch and mdadm detects the fakeraid and creates the /dev/md* devices.
I can then access the raid0 out of the box really.
Then my laptop stopped switching on after a month. Sent in for repairs, they swapped out motherboard and mentioned they did something with a "ssd card" but wouldn't give details.
I then try load Arch again however this time it seems like my raid/sata/bios/firmware controller no longer support IMSM.
I believe this chipset does support IMSM though[1].
According to Intel's nice documentation on this[2], Linux mdadm supports IMSM quite extensively. One can apparently even create a raid0 from within Linux.
Unfortunately, I've tried quite a few things and no luck as per below:
# lspci|grep -i raid
00:1f.2 RAID bus controller: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile SATA Controller [RAID mode] (rev 04)
# mdadm -v -C /dev/md/imsm /dev/sd[ab] -n 2 -e imsm
mdadm: /dev/sda is not suitable for this array.
mdadm: /dev/sdb is not suitable for this array.
mdadm: create aborted
# mdadm --detail-platform :(
mdmon: imsm capabilities not found for controller: /sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1f.2 (type SATA)I've also updated my BIOS. I also changed the UEFI/BIOS setting to RAID and AHCI and back with no luck.
I can't seem to find any type of BIOS/menu to create the RAID before the OS boots.
At the end of the day, I'm wondering, is this a software issue or a hardware issue.
Software issue examples being - Perhaps the RAID0 was created and hence Linux just detected it by getting the metadata off the disk the first time around. Now the RAID0 is not created so Linux perhaps doesn't support it as well as expected.
or
Hardware issue: Some hardware component model changed after it went in for hardware repairs. I suspect this as mdadm should detect mdadm capabilities as apparently the OROM supplies this and is stored and read in memory (not just from the disk metadata).
I'm likely then just going to go with standard software RAID0, which is mostly the same, except that my boot won't be raided, since taking it back in for repairs will be difficult to explain to them and will take them forever to fix again.
Hopefully if some hardware component has changed, I'm not loosing out on any other benefits.
Any thoughts on this?
[1]: http://www.intel.com/support/chipsets/i … 020644.htm
[2]: http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/pu … -paper.pdf
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I'm likely then just going to go with standard software RAID0, which is mostly the same, except that my boot won't be raided
Ok, yeah /boot could obviously be on raid1, but my ideal would be raid0 for boot which I thought wasn't possible.
With grub2 this can be done (boot off raid0).
One more reason not to worry about the lack of IMSM support.
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With grub2 this can be done (boot off raid0).
One more reason not to worry about the lack of IMSM support.
Ok, just to update this for anyone interested...
In the end I settled for simply installing the EFT partition (/boot/eft) on one drive (not raid0) and /boot on the raid0.
Not completely raid0 as I believe that might not be possible with UEFI.
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