I'm trying to get FreeNAS (http://www.FreeNAS.org) to see 2 drives in RAID 0. ---- The hardware: drive1 250GB drive2 500GB (both samsung spinpoint SATA drives) Hardware RAID card - SiI 3114 VIA Epia Mini-ITX motherboard 1Ghz processor (integrated) 1GB RAM ----- I'm trying to install the 2 Samsung drives as raid 0 (so they work as one mass space) The SATA raid controller card will easily let me set up both as raid 0 The motherboard BIOS (Via Epia motherboard) will then see the raid 0 array as one drive. I cannot use the motherboard's SATA ports as freeNAS doesn't like the chipset for them. I then boot up freeNAS from the CD, and it sees both drives, as if they are not set for raid 0 If I then install (whilst the raid is set on the raid card) to one of the drives, and reboot, it cannot work out which drive it should be booting from I've gone through the motherboard BIOS numerous times. I can easily install and use both drives, but running independently of each other (no RAID set), but cannot get them to work as one drive. Any help would be appreciated. The freeNAS box is to archive recorded TV from a Windows Media Center 2005 PC, and to allow others to access the programs on demand. ps. when was the forum upgraded? I've not visited for some months now.
From my experience using different sized drives in a Raid 0 setup generally doesnt work very well. If you were successfull with your 250+500gb drives then chances are you would only get a total of 500GB striped space, as it takes the size of the smaller drive as the size that will be effectively doubled by the striping process. Also looking at your post on freenas' forum (just had a look) and the fact that the raid card isnt properly supported i'd say that could also be the reason that the software raids isnt working either.
If you want it to be one area of storage use something like Logical volume manager (lvm) its much safer than raid. Although i'm not sure if freenas supports it but then you could just use debian and set it up properly. 3k post and it wasn't spam....
3000 posts congrats I've put the sata drives both on the motherboard and removed the controller card I can get it to recognise the drives using JBOD, and managed to get to the mounting point with it seeing the combined drive space. It was the total space of the two combined drives. however it won't mount despite trying all combinations. I rebooted, and it wont start the software raid again.
I'd be inclined to go for a full linux distro, you get a bit more control. Although i doubt you'll get those soft raid ports to work properly under either linux or freenas they're effectively the new win-modem and best avoided.
Does this motherboard have sata ports attached to the south bridge instead of a raid controller? Just had a look around and some people advocate re-flashing the cards bios as non raid, after you've done that you could use lvm to run in a similar manner to raid0 but it would use all 750gb and you can partition on the fly. As for other os's depending on what your comfortable with ubuntu or debian would be more than adequate for this and would use (much) less than 1gb.
Why would you do that? You'll end up with one 500GB raid, you'll effectivly lose the 250GB drive (actually you'll lose half the size of the 500GB hard drive) for no benefit but add the risks that raid 0 has. Either JBOD them in FreeNAS to get a 750GB raid or create a mount points for each, and a share for one, then use ln -s to link the second mount point as a sub directory in the share.
I watch recorded TV programs from the media computer (win XP 2005) and I can only seem to watch the recordings at obscure times (when others have gone to bed) when the older desktop was my main PC I was using my 22" Samsung monitor. I off loaded the internet radio playing to my Mini-ITX computer, built for just playing audio. as I'm now using a laptop for my main computer, and my DJ'ing. the 22" monitor was no longer getting used. I've now swapped the usage of my Mini-ITX Hi-Fi and my old desktop. as the old desktop has the only graphics powerful enough to let me use the 22" monitor to watch recorded TV streamed from the media computer in the living room. all the info about the Mini-ITX computers' hardware is in the project log for it: http://forums.bit-tech.net/showthread.php?t=132939 as I hadn't got round to completing the front panel, I will be putting the VFD, PowerMate, and switches in the old desktop case: http://www.silverstonetek.com/products/p_contents.php?pno=tj04&area=usa It should look just as good. It's a more practical use for all the computers I've got.
