Hi all,
I’m doing some experimentation with a desktop computer I built a few months ago, were I need to be able to double boot between Windows 11 and ArchLinux. My main operating system (for the moment) is Windows 11, with which I do all my daily work. I have 3 NVME disks, 1 for ArchLinux and with the other 2 disks I created a RAID 0 array with the motherboard’s built in RAID software and installed Windows 11 on top of it (motherboard = ASUS TUF GAMING X670E-PLUS WIFI). I have read online that it would be possible to access the RAID array with mdraid or mdadm, but neither work.
Does anyone here know if there’s anything I can do to access the RAID array from ArchLinux?
Yes: undo the AMD RAID. Hardware RAID is essentially dead, especially as you’ll loose data when (not if!) it goes bang. Using software RAID makes the drives accessible for the OS on a new mainboard. Furthermore, RAID0 is not RAID but JBOD and also a sure way to loose data: if even 1 drive fails, every last bit of your data is gone and can never be retrieved. Ever. No, you won’t be “lucky” and yes, it’s gonna happen to you at one point in time. Period. It may be next week, next year or even later, but it’ll happen. 
Hope I didn’t scare you off too much, as there’s a solution: RAID1. What you loose in capacity you’ll gain in redundancy: both drives are exact copies of the other. That’s good, b/c if one drive fails, you still have the other one. Oh, did I mention backups yet? Very useful when data goes MIA, like when drives fail.
But now you want capacity and redundancy. There’s a solution for that too: RAID5 and RAID6. Essentially the same, except on RAID5 there’s only one disk redundancy (like RAID1) and RAID6 offers 2 disks redundancy. Best of all, for either RAID level it doesn’t matter which drive(s) fail.
Best case scenario: buy a PCIe to 4x M.2 adapter card, populate with suitably sized M.2 SSD’s of at least 2 different brands and configure those as RAID6 in the OS. Of course, you’d need to have a PCIe x16 slot available that also has to support 4x4x4x4 bifurcation.
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this really needs to be a global faq: do not do fakeraid. fakeraid was never good. hardware raid used to be good, but now is unreliable. use software raid if you wont/cant simply use zfs.
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Hey @Dutch_Master ,
Thanks for your explanation.
And yes, I agree on all you said, but I don’t really care if the array blows up my data since I do daily backup on a NAS at home and a cloud backup provider, so it have very little chance of loosing my data (never equal to 0).
The reason why I’m using RAID 0 (or JBOD as you said) is because I had 2 1TB nvme disks and didn’t have money to buy a bigger one. I need at least 2 TB in my main operating system and I figured why not using RAID 0 to increase the available storage and speed?
As bloated as Win-11 is, it’ll still fit on a <1TB drive, so if you haven’t already, I’d suggest splitting the OS and your data on physically different disks. Should you still need 2TB storage after that, by all means use the onboard RAID0 tools for Win-OS. But as you’ve found out, Linux has no way to access these drives unless you undo the AMD RAID.
Given you already have a NAS, you may want to configure your system to work from that NAS instead of local storage. But that does require a suitably fast and reliable connection between the machines, not a given if said connection has to traverse the WWW 