RAID trouble (controllers: AMD SB 600, Marvell 6121)

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peterfaj
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RAID trouble (controllers: AMD SB 600, Marvell 6121)

Post by peterfaj »

My motherboard (Asus M3A32-MVP Deluxe) has two SATA contollers: AMD SB 600 and Marvell 6121. I have Windows XP SP2 installed on a 750GB drive and want to put two 1500GB drives into a RAID0 field.
If I connect the latter two to the Marvell connectors (set to RAID in BIOS) and the former one into an AMD connector (set to IDE), set the Marvell RAID0 field up and boot from the 750GB drive, I cannot see any trace of the 1500G drives.
If I connect the 1500GB ones into AMD connectors (set to RAID) and 750GB into Marvell (set to IDE), I can only boot from the newly created RAID field, therefore I cannot boot at all (BIOS problem I guess).
If I connect all drives into AMD connectors (set to RAID) and set up a RAID0 field with the 1500GB discs, but leave the 750GB alone, I cannot boot into Windows, because as soon as the loading screen appears, so does a BSOD.
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vellu
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Re: RAID trouble (controllers: AMD SB 600, Marvell 6121)

Post by vellu »

Are you saying the when you boot up to XP you cannot see the drives connected to the marvell controller at all? Not even in "control panel -> system -> device manager". If so you propably need to (re)install the Marvell drivers for XP.

You are sure the Marvell (in IDE mode) can't be set as boot device? First setup your RAID0(SB600) and Marvell (IDE), reboot->go into bios and re-check the boot settings: see what hdd are available for boot (rearrange as needed) and setup the appropriate boot sequence.

Ps. Be sure the have either backups or non-critical data on your freshly created RAID0, as it has no fault tolerance of any kind. Failure in either of the drives will result in loss of ALL data on BOTH drives.
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peterfaj
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Re: RAID trouble (controllers: AMD SB 600, Marvell 6121)

Post by peterfaj »

Marvell can be set as a boot device, unless the AMD controller is in RAID mode for some reason.
I checked the drives by right-clicking "My computer" and clicking "Manage" and the hard drive manager in there or something like that (it shows unpartitioned drives, so I expected to see it there). I didn't check the device manager. I would check there now, but I'm in Linux ATM (where I have just as many problems (Marvell RAID arrays/drives don't exist, but at least I can boot with AMD RAID (I can't use the RAID array though)).

I might end up buying a real hardware RAID controller, but I don't know where to check if it's real RAID or fakeraid, because it was never stated for my motherboard to only support fakeraid.
What would be the best type of a hardware RAID controller, a PCI card, a PCI-E card or something else (if there is another way)?
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vellu
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Re: RAID trouble (controllers: AMD SB 600, Marvell 6121)

Post by vellu »

peterfaj wrote:I might end up buying a real hardware RAID controller, but I don't know where to check if it's real RAID or fakeraid, because it was never stated for my motherboard to only support fakeraid.
What would be the best type of a hardware RAID controller, a PCI card, a PCI-E card or something else (if there is another way)?
PCI or PCI-e really only depends on your own hardware (PCI-e has more bandwidth though, but that really kicks in with 4+ drivers attached to a single controller or SAS).

I prefer Promise or Adaptec for high performance/high reliabilty cases. Be warned though, proper hardware RAID controllers are not cheap, but for a home/mid-range performance a software controller will do just fine. (for example Promise FastTrak controllers (which are software based) start from about 90€, where as Promise SuperTrak controllers (which are hardware based) start from about 250€)

True hardware raid isn't necessary for "everyday" use. It becomes necessary only at extreme I/O levels (enterprise servers or database hosts), when a CPU-based controller just isn't enough.
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peterfaj
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Re: RAID trouble (controllers: AMD SB 600, Marvell 6121)

Post by peterfaj »

In the second case (Marvell RAID), I can see a hard drive called "MARVELL Raid VD 0 SCSI Disk Device", but it's not present in "Disk Management".

EDIT: I did install the drivers.

EDIT2: It is visible in PartitionMagic and I can create partitions there, so I guess problem solved in Windows. Yay.
Now I need to solve it for Linux, which might be problematic, because I can't find any Linux drivers for Marvell 6121.

EDIT3: Its size is not correct in PartitionMagic (2TB instead of 3). Other partitioning programs have the same problem.
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Re: RAID trouble (controllers: AMD SB 600, Marvell 6121)

Post by vellu »

That, I'm afraid, is a limitation of NTFS (maximum partition table (MBR) size is 2TB, 64TB for XP64). You need to create a "dynamic" volume in disk manager for bigger partitions.

However booting from a dynamic (or GPT) volume requires EFI-support and 64bit OS, but as I understood you won't be booting from that partition, correct?

I'm not very familiar with Linux, but I would imagine similar limitations exist (as they are NTFS limits, and as such not limited to a specific OS)

See attached image, as to how. NOTE: Convert the DISK to dynamic, not the drive/partition! (a dynamic disk can have multiple partitions in it if needed)
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Disk manager view
Disk manager view
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peterfaj
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Re: RAID trouble (controllers: AMD SB 600, Marvell 6121)

Post by peterfaj »

Thanks for the reply, but there's a problem with that too. Firstly, the drive does not appear in the Disk Management. And secondly, if I understand MBR correctly, only partitions are limited to 2TB, but in my case the whole disk is just 2TB.
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Re: RAID trouble (controllers: AMD SB 600, Marvell 6121)

Post by vellu »

What does the Marvell controller itself report as the size of the array (the configurator during bootup, don't go into OS at all)?
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peterfaj
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Re: RAID trouble (controllers: AMD SB 600, Marvell 6121)

Post by peterfaj »

3 TB. More precisely 3000470 MB I think.
I have managed to see the right size with a Windows 7 installer I had lying around (around 2,7 TiB), but I couldn't partition it in its entirety. And I couldn't convert it to GPT from there.
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Re: RAID trouble (controllers: AMD SB 600, Marvell 6121)

Post by vellu »

You could partition with that installer to (for example) two 1.5 TB partitions, which would then give the correct total size. After the OS install you should be able to see the disk and the partition in disk manager where you should be able to convert the disk to dynamic and re-partition to one partition.
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peterfaj
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Re: RAID trouble (controllers: AMD SB 600, Marvell 6121)

Post by peterfaj »

vellu wrote:You could partition with that installer to (for example) two 1.5 TB partitions, which would then give the correct total size. After the OS install you should be able to see the disk and the partition in disk manager where you should be able to convert the disk to dynamic and re-partition to one partition.
I have tried making two partitions, one as big as possible and the other one what's left. But I could not create the second partition. I learned that MBR not only limits a partition's size, but also where it begins. I didn't try making two 1,5TB partitions, though. That should work, because it does not start after the limit. Why didn't I do that?
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