Please Support BIOS RAID Again!

[spirit]

I'm not sure, but maybe in proxmox2 (debian squeeze), it's was dmraid for softraid management and in proxmox3 (wheezy) is mdadm.

maybe mdadm can't read yet the metadata write by your bios.



(A fake software raid bios, just write raid configuration on the disk, then the controller driver inside os will read this infos. If the driver is too old, the 2 disks will be expose instead raid config)

 

[spirit]

This article:
https://raid.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/DDF_Fake_RAID

said that mdadm 3.3 have good support for DDF format.

But debian wheezy id on mdadm 3.2.5.

So maybe that's why it doesn't work yet with your bios.

 

[kobuki]

So it had support at some time and then removed. That's what OP sees in newer/older PVE installations.

However, when I'm creating a mirror with mdadm, I learned to never create a simple mirror but a RAID10 with f2 layout. It's a special configuration supported with at least 2 disks, and provides balancing of stripe reads between the 2 disks, resulting in almost the same read performance a RAID0 setup provides plus improved seek times and consequently better IOPS. This is not something a BIOS-initiated software RAID can provide, I assume - another reason to ditch it entirely. An example of a relevant mdadm command looks something like this:

mdadm --create --level=10 --raid-devices=2 --layout=f2 /dev/md0 /dev/sd[ab]1

 

[tom]

Our ISO installer never supported this and softraid is not covered by enterprise support.

if you want softraid just do a custom installation via http://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Install_Proxmox_VE_on_Debian_Wheezy

I will close this thread for now.