I just built a brand new pc with a Gigabyte B650 Gaming AX v2 motherboard with 2xnvme drives and 2xssd drives. In UEFI I configured two raid-1 arrays, one for nvme and one for ssd. Then booted from the Fedora 41 live image and started the installation and I expected that the installer would see just 2 drive - one for each raid array. However, it detected all 4 drives individually.
Then I stopped the installation and in a shell I ran lsblk -f and indeed, the 4 disks were treated as separate.
One post on google mentioned that hardware raid requires some drivers that exist for windows, but linux only supports some raid controllers. That's surprising to me, because I've had raid on various machines over the years without the issue - maybe because they were all Dell.
Of course, I can do software raid, but does anyone have any experience with hardware raid on Fedora with a Gigabyte motherboard?
Thanks!
On 2 Mar 2025, at 22:10, Amadeus WM via users users@lists.fedoraproject.org wrote:
Gigabyte B650 Gaming AX v2 motherboard
This board does not appear to have hardware raid. You may just have BIOS RAID.
Which linux should have detected.
Barry
On Sun, 2 Mar 2025 22:54:04 +0000, Barry wrote:
On 2 Mar 2025, at 22:10, Amadeus WM via users users@lists.fedoraproject.org wrote:
Gigabyte B650 Gaming AX v2 motherboard
This board does not appear to have hardware raid. You may just have BIOS RAID.
Which linux should have detected.
Barry
I thought raid configured on the motherboard or on a dedicated raid card is hardware raid. How do I tell if it has hw raid or not?
On 3/2/25 2:09 PM, Amadeus WM via users wrote:
I just built a brand new pc with a Gigabyte B650 Gaming AX v2 motherboard with 2xnvme drives and 2xssd drives. In UEFI I configured two raid-1 arrays, one for nvme and one for ssd. Then booted from the Fedora 41 live image and started the installation and I expected that the installer would see just 2 drive - one for each raid array. However, it detected all 4 drives individually.
Then I stopped the installation and in a shell I ran lsblk -f and indeed, the 4 disks were treated as separate.
One post on google mentioned that hardware raid requires some drivers that exist for windows, but linux only supports some raid controllers. That's surprising to me, because I've had raid on various machines over the years without the issue - maybe because they were all Dell.
Of course, I can do software raid, but does anyone have any experience with hardware raid on Fedora with a Gigabyte motherboard?
If the OS can see all 4 drives, then the "RAID" isn't hardware RAID and isn't really doing anything. Is there a reason you don't want to use the Linux software RAID? It's generally a better option.
It is termed "fakeraid". It is not hardware raid. The only hardware that exists for it is a couple of entries in the bios and on the disk saying the disk are raid.
All of the work is done in the driver/OS.
And generally on linux (and windows) it has been poorly supported and always needed an add-on driver and that add-on driver sometimes breaks on updates.
And this fakeraid would also prevent you from moving these disks to another motherboard (not of the same type).
Avoid using it and use linux md software raid.
On Sun, Mar 2, 2025 at 4:10 PM Amadeus WM via users users@lists.fedoraproject.org wrote:
I just built a brand new pc with a Gigabyte B650 Gaming AX v2 motherboard with 2xnvme drives and 2xssd drives. In UEFI I configured two raid-1 arrays, one for nvme and one for ssd. Then booted from the Fedora 41 live image and started the installation and I expected that the installer would see just 2 drive - one for each raid array. However, it detected all 4 drives individually.
Then I stopped the installation and in a shell I ran lsblk -f and indeed, the 4 disks were treated as separate.
One post on google mentioned that hardware raid requires some drivers that exist for windows, but linux only supports some raid controllers. That's surprising to me, because I've had raid on various machines over the years without the issue - maybe because they were all Dell.
Of course, I can do software raid, but does anyone have any experience with hardware raid on Fedora with a Gigabyte motherboard?
Thanks!
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On Sun, 2 Mar 2025 17:20:11 -0800, Samuel Sieb wrote:
On 3/2/25 2:09 PM, Amadeus WM via users wrote:
I just built a brand new pc with a Gigabyte B650 Gaming AX v2 motherboard with 2xnvme drives and 2xssd drives. In UEFI I configured two raid-1 arrays, one for nvme and one for ssd. Then booted from the Fedora 41 live image and started the installation and I expected that the installer would see just 2 drive - one for each raid array. However, it detected all 4 drives individually.
Then I stopped the installation and in a shell I ran lsblk -f and indeed, the 4 disks were treated as separate.
One post on google mentioned that hardware raid requires some drivers that exist for windows, but linux only supports some raid controllers. That's surprising to me, because I've had raid on various machines over the years without the issue - maybe because they were all Dell.
Of course, I can do software raid, but does anyone have any experience with hardware raid on Fedora with a Gigabyte motherboard?
If the OS can see all 4 drives, then the "RAID" isn't hardware RAID and isn't really doing anything. Is there a reason you don't want to use the Linux software RAID? It's generally a better option.
Anything done in hardware must be faster than in software, so if true raid works correctly and is being recognized by the os, I think it's preferable. Of course, if software raid is the only option, I have no objections using it.
On Sun, 2 Mar 2025 19:40:08 -0600, Roger Heflin wrote:
It is termed "fakeraid". It is not hardware raid. The only hardware that exists for it is a couple of entries in the bios and on the disk saying the disk are raid.
All of the work is done in the driver/OS.
And generally on linux (and windows) it has been poorly supported and always needed an add-on driver and that add-on driver sometimes breaks on updates.
And this fakeraid would also prevent you from moving these disks to another motherboard (not of the same type).
Avoid using it and use linux md software raid.
On Sun, Mar 2, 2025 at 4:10 PM Amadeus WM via users users@lists.fedoraproject.org wrote:
I just built a brand new pc with a Gigabyte B650 Gaming AX v2 motherboard with 2xnvme drives and 2xssd drives. In UEFI I configured two raid-1 arrays, one for nvme and one for ssd. Then booted from the Fedora 41 live image and started the installation and I expected that the installer would see just 2 drive - one for each raid array. However, it detected all 4 drives individually.
Then I stopped the installation and in a shell I ran lsblk -f and indeed, the 4 disks were treated as separate.
One post on google mentioned that hardware raid requires some drivers that exist for windows, but linux only supports some raid controllers. That's surprising to me, because I've had raid on various machines over the years without the issue - maybe because they were all Dell.
Of course, I can do software raid, but does anyone have any experience with hardware raid on Fedora with a Gigabyte motherboard?
Thanks!
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Software it is. I didn't know about fakeraid and how it works. It did seem a little fast - like instant - when I created the arrays, compared to what I remember from creating the arrays on my old Dell Precision machine, but I attributed that to the disk speed.
Thanks!
Samuel Sieb writes:
If the OS can see all 4 drives, then the "RAID" isn't hardware RAID and isn't really doing anything. Is there a reason you don't want to use the Linux software RAID? It's generally a better option.
Here's one data point on why Linux mdraid is better. Many years ago Grub's required reserved space requirement at the beginning of the disk was increased. It was not possible to upgrade to the next release of Fedora unless the first partition started at a later offset.
You were pretty much boned unless you used mdraid to RAID-1 two hard drives. No problem.
1. IIRC there was no Live image back then, the install CD gave you a rescue shell as an option, so you boot that. 2. Unmount the first md-raid partition. 3. Use resize2fs to shrink the logical partition by a generous amount. 4. Use mdadm to shrink the raid-1 volume by a slightly less generous amount, so its size matches the size of the new partition that will start at a higher offset. 5. Use mdadm to take one of the hard drives out of the raid volume. 6. Use fdisk/parted to drop the partition and recreate it, with a higher starting offset 7. Use mdadm to add the partition back to the raid volume, and wait for it to resync. 8. Now repeat the same process with the other hard drive. 9. Use resize2fs to grow the relocated partition to its full size. 10. Upgrade to a new release of Fedora and grub.
Try doing that with your hardware raid.
On 3/2/25 6:06 PM, Amadeus WM via users wrote:
On Sun, 2 Mar 2025 17:20:11 -0800, Samuel Sieb wrote:
If the OS can see all 4 drives, then the "RAID" isn't hardware RAID and isn't really doing anything. Is there a reason you don't want to use the Linux software RAID? It's generally a better option.
Anything done in hardware must be faster than in software, so if true raid works correctly and is being recognized by the os, I think it's preferable. Of course, if software raid is the only option, I have no objections using it.
This is very much not true. "hardware" RAID is just software RAID moved to an embedded CPU instead and generally a much less powerful one than the one in the computer. The only possible benefit in the past was that it offloaded the data transfer to multiple buses on the card. But that really doesn't matter now since each drive has a SATA bus or even NVME and the OS is easily capable of fully utilizing the bus capacity up to the limit of the drive.
On Mon, 2025-03-03 at 02:06 +0000, Amadeus WM via users wrote:
Anything done in hardware must be faster than in software, so if true raid works correctly and is being recognized by the os, I think it's preferable.
Not necessarily so. And drives in hardware raid *may* only work in that hardware (this is quite common, and may be deliberate vendor lock- in). If you have a hardware failure, or want to upgrade hardware in the future, you can't simply unplug the drive and slot them into new hardware.
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Amadeus WM -
Barry -
Roger Heflin -
Sam Varshavchik -
Samuel Sieb -
Tim