Re: [tlug] White Box: Some Assembly Required ...

[Jens John <lists@example.com>]

>From the looks of it, I suspect that AMDSB950 has a "fake-RAID" chip which cannot do RAID on its own but needs additional operating system support (see e.g. [1]). The driver situation on Linux seems unclear. So I suggest that if you want some kind of stable RAID configuration, you drop the board's RAID functionality and focus on a software RAID setup in Linux (possibly with LVM, your choice, though IMO LVM is always a usability improvement) or purchase a real RAID controller card, if possible from a widely-used vendor like LSI (which has in-tree drivers) to bypass issues with crappy hardware and firmware.

Note that should you choose to use the SATA port multiplier at all, SMART command passthrough may be an issue, making the monitoring of the drives' health difficult or impossible (typically, you'd use the smartmontools for this, but some hardware like port multipliers requires custom SATA commands to be able to address specific drives behind a port multiplier). I suggest you crosscheck with the smartmontools mailing lists to see if there are issues with the hardware you're looking to use.

[1] https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=225489