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I have Dell PowerEdge 1950 with hardware raid Perc 5/i.

I want use software raid md/lvm.

Is any way to totally disable this raid and see "raw" sata disks?

I play alot with BIOS , enable SATA, disable raid controller, but nothing happents, i not see the disks.

Any advice?

Korjavin Ivan
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  • out of curiosity - can you please tell why do you prefer md/lvm instead of perc in this case? thx! – pQd Aug 02 '12 at 06:10
  • I hate this perc. Its slow, and low featured. For example i have 2 disk 500G and 1T and want create 500G raid1 and 500G without raid. With perc - i cant do that. Also Megacli utility - terrible. Also md and lvm works very well. – Korjavin Ivan Aug 02 '12 at 08:03
  • "Its slow" it is not any slower than software raid will be. – JamesRyan Oct 08 '14 at 13:02

2 Answers2

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I had a similar problem with the LSI controller. I've every single disk exported as a JBOD device.

Jan Marek
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Are you trying to use a filesystem solution like ZFS, which prefers RAW disks? If so, the better long-term approach is to use a dedicated SAS controller (HBA) instead of a RAID controller. I tend to prefer LSI's offerings.

Also see: ZFS SAS/SATA controller recommendations

Community
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ewwhite
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  • Thanks alot. Yes, i want something like zfs, but on this hardware, without upgrades. Just wonder if it possible. – Korjavin Ivan Aug 02 '12 at 12:30
  • Nope. Not unless you create RAID 0 arrays comprised of one disk each and present the resulting volumes to ZFS. – ewwhite Aug 02 '12 at 12:40