[TriLUG] B320i RAID controller driver

[Matt Flyer via TriLUG]

On Fri, 2020-05-22 at 18:04 +0000, Joseph Mack NA3T wrote:
> You're about to start with a new disk setup. I assume you don't want
> to spend 
> any more money than neccessary, but disks are cheap now. Now is a
> good time to 
> rethink your disks. 

Wasn't planning on spending any money, just want to re-purpose what I
have in the best means available.	

> For data storage, I only buy 4TB or more. If you want to 
> boot off an MSDOS partition, then it has to be 2TB.
I don't think I need an MSDOS partition, except for the EFI one, which
isn't very big. 
> 
> I don't like the idea of RAID 1+0. If a disk fails, the other disk
> than makes up 
> the other half of the file system, doesn't have a consistent file
> system 
> (AFAIK). You could have half of a file on the dead disk and half of
> the file on 
> the alive disk. This means that the alive disk you can't fsck for
> instance and 
> you can't put it on another machine to test it.

There are some disadvantages with RAID. A coworker says
that he likes RAID 6. I thought though that RAID 1+0 uses two mirrored pairs with each pair having half the blocks. Consequently, it would take two drive failures, of the same pair, in order to lose data. 
> In your setup with 4 disks, I would have two mirrored pairs and mount
> them so 
> that they make up your whole filesystem.
Good point. Are you suggesting making two mirrored pairs and then say
logically calling them SDA and SDB?  An LVM type file system or similar
could spread the partitions across them.

> </unsolicited advice>
> 
> Joe
Thank you and everyone else for contributing and replying.  

As it stands, I disabled the hardware RAID controller and Linux install
medium can now see the 4 disks.  Choices, choices when it comes to the
setup.