Marvell 88SE9172 RAID issue

[zelmani]

Hi together,

I have Linux mint installed on an ssd and set up an additional raid 1 array for my media collection as well as for backup purposes. The two hdds are connected to sata ports controlled by a Marvell 88SE9172 on my Gigabyte X97-UD3 board. They are configured as RAID, not AHCI, in bios, and the controller interface shows the virtual disk as set up correctly with both member disks. Now, I expected the virtual disk to appear in mints disk manage dialogue, but I only see the physical hdds as /dev/sdc and /dev/sdd. In GParted, too, I only get the physical disks. Any action like partitioning, formatting against one of the disks, of course, leads to the controller reporting the array to be degraded on reboot.

Am I missing just a simple thing or is this a a real hardware compatibility issue?

I'm totally new to Linux, so please be patient with me in case I don't get the message instantly.

Thanks for your support.

Bernd

[mintybits]

I can give you some pointers.
Motherboard RAID is not proper hardware RAID...it is a feature to help Windows do software RAID. So linux users seldom use it and instead turn off the RAID in the bios and create linux software RAID arrays using mdadm. Linux does not require mobo support to do RAID.
You can use bios RAID in linux if you wish by using the dmraid driver.
Google for dmraid and mdadm to find out more.

[zelmani]

Hi,

dmraid seems to have done the trick. Thanks for your help.