Unable to Add Hardware RAID to CentOS 7

I’m running a new CentOS 7 system on a AMD Threadripper 1900x. I have a RAID 10 created in the BIOs, I can see the full capacity in the BIOs. However, an fdisk -l doesn’t show it. That is preventing me from adding it. Any idea why?

Also, I upgraded the kernel to 4.19

It doesn’t work like that. Because AMD raid is a kind of software raid, Linux folks expect you to use my, which is very good. Is this a dual boot system or do you just want nvme raid on Linux? If so nothing special is needed in bios for the setup. Many Linux installers can handle raid setup at install time as well

Thanks for reaching out Wendell!

It’s not a dual boot system.
It’s also not an nvme system. All of the drives are SATA.

Won’t I get higher performance with the hardware over software?

It’s not truly hardware. Md is tuned carefully and is plenty fast. The hardware assist for raid-y typr math operations means the performance hit is negligible. These days unless I was spending $400+ on the raid controller I would feel better about md than pretty much any other solution. I’d probably also use zfs but that’s quite a bit more overhead.

Having recently used two nvme in raid0 on Linux with xfs… well… it’s fast. The kind of fast to lust over. Thinking about doing /home on this with rsync to the zfs pool lololol but I digress

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So I should run off to my BIOS, disable that RAID, then learn about Md, and set that up?

Yep. Most Linux installers will let you set up md raid right from the installer.

That would be nice, but I’m way past the installer. I’m a student and needed this system up. I figured I could live off my boot drive for a while. But tonight I’m fixing it.

Cli setup of md is pretty easy. Making the MD device /home?

You can rsync -avh /home /mdmountpoint then setup fstab for the MD device to mount on /home reboot and viola?

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Yeah, I think that’s the plan.

Thanks Wendell! My array is building, it will be done in 1605 minutes.

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Hey guys, i have 2x2TB NVME RAID 0 on Aorus Xtreme, runs fine in windows + raidxpert, but i can`t get it to work in linux. I only see them as 2x 2TB individial devices in Linux Mint. Is there raidxprert software for linux that i need to run same as on win? I cant find it anywhere…

If you use raidexpert it means that you have probably configured the raid in the bios. If this is the case, it’s not a real hardware raid. It’s a fakeraid, google it and you will find out. It is just an agreement between the bios and the pseudo hardware raid driver but it is not an hardware raid since it’s the driver that does all the job. A real hardware raid comes with its own CPU and memory and preferably a backup battery if you want to enable the write back cache. I have tested a lot of bios raid and Windows software in the past and most of the time the Windows software raid was faster. Furthermore, you can change your motherboard without loosing your data in this configuration. But even with a fully software raid, I don’t thing that Linux will see your Windows raid.

I have also a setup involving 2 NVME Raid 0. I didn’t find a way to share the raid between Windows and Linux. Since my motherboard has 3 nvme slots,I ended up having the Linux raid using 2 nvme configured using BTRFS RAID (because I think this is best file system) and using Windows on the 3rd NVME module in a non raid configuration.

thank you topolittle. I should have mentioned its bios raid, im aware of software vs hardraid differences. I used bios raid and raidxpert hoping it would work, becuase for older AMD boards there actually is raidxpert for Linux. But i was not able to find of for x399 platform…
Anyways i have slightly different setup then you, where i use boards nvme slost for 265gb nvme Linux, and 512gb nvme Win 10 . For raid 0 i have another 2x2TB samsung 970 Evo in Asus PCI express card ,running 16x slot at 4x4x4x4 split.