A tool to manage BIOS-driven Fake RAID which is managed by the dmraid tool. It is useful when sharing volumes between Linux and Windows, for example.
- The DMRAID Homepage
- The Ubuntu Community maintained FakeRAID HOWTO
Fake RAID is software RAID provided by the BIOS on the motherboard.
It's up to debate whether fake RAID has any performance advantage over Linux Software RAID (MD) since it's still delegated to the CPU. The best advantage it has is sharing the volumes between multiple OSs that also support this metadata, e.g. Windows. Depending on the actual fake RAID metadata format, it may be portable to other systems.
dmraid -l
asr : Adaptec HostRAID ASR (0,1,10)
ddf1 : SNIA DDF1 (0,1,4,5,linear)
hpt37x : Highpoint HPT37X (S,0,1,10,01)
hpt45x : Highpoint HPT45X (S,0,1,10)
isw : Intel Software RAID (0,1,5,01)
jmicron : JMicron ATARAID (S,0,1)
lsi : LSI Logic MegaRAID (0,1,10)
nvidia : NVidia RAID (S,0,1,10,5)
pdc : Promise FastTrack (S,0,1,10)
sil : Silicon Image(tm) Medley(tm) (0,1,10)
via : VIA Software RAID (S,0,1,10)
dos : DOS partitions on SW RAIDs
mdadm does support the Intel imsm metadata format in more recent Linux kernels; known as Intel Rapid Storage Technology, formally Intel Matrix RAID.
It may be possible for one to migrate from a fake RAID metadata format to the md metadata format.
