Recognize and use Hardware RAID 5

Should I abandon this setup altogether and just use software RAID?

I am running 20.04 LTS on a SSD and have 3 1TB drives setup with a RAID 5 array through Asus/AMD RAIDXpert.

I can see all the drives in gparted and lshw -C disk shows

 *-disk:0 description: ATA Disk product: KINGSTON SV300S3 physical id: 0 bus info: scsi@1:0.0.0 logical name: /dev/sda version: BBF0 serial: 50026B7746002607 size: 111GiB (120GB) capabilities: partitioned partitioned:dos configuration: ansiversion=5 logicalsectorsize=512 sectorsize=512 signature=f76fefc9 *-disk:1 description: ATA Disk product: WDC WD10EZEX-00B vendor: Western Digital physical id: 1 bus info: scsi@2:0.0.0 logical name: /dev/sdb version: 1A01 serial: WD-WCC3FL8EZ2YN size: 931GiB (1TB) configuration: ansiversion=5 logicalsectorsize=512 sectorsize=4096 *-disk:2 description: ATA Disk product: WDC WD10EZEX-00B vendor: Western Digital physical id: 2 bus info: scsi@4:0.0.0 logical name: /dev/sdc version: 1A01 serial: WD-WCC3FKE06EZ4 size: 931GiB (1TB) configuration: ansiversion=5 logicalsectorsize=512 sectorsize=4096 *-disk:3 description: ATA Disk product: WDC WD10EZEX-00B vendor: Western Digital physical id: 3 bus info: scsi@5:0.0.0 logical name: /dev/sdd version: 1A01 serial: WD-WCC3FL8EZLVA size: 931GiB (1TB) configuration: ansiversion=5 logicalsectorsize=512 sectorsize=4096

Here are the images from the RAID config utility that I accessed during bootup.LD ViewLD Definition

I also saw this AMD RAIDXpert driver (rcraid) PPA and followed the instructions on the page, but am not sure what it did, if anything.

I also found this rcraid on github but this was aimed at booting from RAID. I'm booting from the SSD and trying to use hardware RAID for storage. FYI, following those instructions prevented me from booting until I reverted the changes to grub through recovery mode.

1 Answer

This is not a real hardware RAID card in that it still needs OS support and is at least partly closed source software.

You would be better off using the software RAID capabilities of Linux itself, as made available to you in the Ubuntu installer or the OS after install, or else just expose them as separate devices.