Cant see volume/disk on Promise FastTrak TX2300 raid controller

[PopovN]

8.10 liveCD Kubuntu

Promise FastTrak TX2300 raid controller
http://www.promise.com/product/product_detail_eng.asp?product_id=136
2 SATA disks in STRIPE (raid 0)

In LiveCD mode in file-manager i see icon for my fat32 disk on that stripe, bat on click it show error

In installation mode i see both my SATA disk NOT IN stripe - like several disk in system.

Now i see what have not last firmware for this controller - bat cant change it shortly. Later will update this bug if with new fimware anything changes.

[Saivann Carignan (oxmosys)]

After reading about that issue, it seems that your card is not a real hardware RAID controller (which are generally expensive because the controller itself take care of everything, and ubuntu only see the final RAID drive if it has drivers for this controler). In your case, the Promise FastTrak TX2300 raid controller is a software RAID, which means that the card is almost nothing more than two SATA port, with a software from the constructor to make it "looks like RAID".

Even with drivers for this device, it should not be a surprise that ubuntu show you the drives and not a "RAID array", because it the real world there os no real RAID at all, so ubuntu is pretty accurate. The reasons why ubuntu won't use the software RAID provided by the constructor is simply that all cards have their own softwares, which works differently and there is no standard, this means a lot of potential problems : useless and hard to maintain softwares and drivers not supported by their constructor and no solution or support in case of failures or problems. So you can choose to download drivers from the constructor and try to install them, but your experience is very likely to be horrible.

Fortunately, you don't need this at all to operate a software RAID on Linux. Any controller connected on your system can have hard drives that can be used to create new RAID arrays, no matter where the drive is connected (on your motherboard controller, your FastTrak raid controller, even USB hard drives (but that would not be a good idea after all) :-) All RAID levels are available, depending on what you want to create, and the performances will be exactly the same with Linux own software RAID than with the software provided by your RAID controler.

If you want to start playing with RAID, you can have a look at mdadm here :
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/SoftwareRAID