Saturday, November 28, 2009

The RocketRaid 1740 (rr174x) is a  4-channel PCI to Serial ATA II RAID controller, which according to the documentation is "ideal for small business home and office servers, NAS storage, workgroup and web servers". In this case it is being used in a generic PC to create and manage a RAID5 array of 4 1TB disks for a simple data storage facility.

The 174x (and other HighPoint products) have good and well-documented driver support for a range of operating systems including diverse Linux distributions and FreeBSD, see here for details:

http://www.highpoint-tech.com/BIOS_Driver/page/rr1740.htm

It appears the most reliable way to install the driver is to use the "Open Source Driver" provided at the bottom of the drivers page. Follow a fresh installation the following packages need to be installed to do this:

• gcc
• make
• linux-headers-$(uname -r)

Download the .tgz file to a suitable directory, and in the directory product/rr1740pm/linux/ execute "make install". (No need for a prior "make").

Following a reboot the rr174x kernel module should be successfully installed and issuing dmesg | grep rr174x  should produce output like this:

[   27.757987] rr174x: module license 'Proprietary' taints kernel.
[   27.766618] rr174x:RocketRAID 174x controller driver v2.4 (Nov 28 2009 17:49:58)
[   27.766694] rr174x:adapter at PCI 2:4:0, IRQ 18
[   28.342352] rr174x:start channel [0,0]
[   28.343802] rr174x:start channel [0,1]
[   28.345248] rr174x:start channel [0,2]
[   28.346694] rr174x:start channel [0,3]
[   28.556067] rr174x:[0 0] Start channel soft reset.
[   28.556094] rr174x:[0 1] Start channel soft reset.
[   28.556115] rr174x:[0 2] Start channel soft reset.
[   28.556134] rr174x:[0 3] Start channel soft reset.
[   28.956572] rr174x:channel [0,0] started successfully
[   29.088461] rr174x:channel [0,1] started successfully
[   29.210253] rr174x:channel [0,2] started successfully
[   29.322073] rr174x:channel [0,3] started successfully
[   29.416168] scsi2 : rr174x

Update: this works in exactly the same way in Ubuntu 10.4 LTS, so presumably all recent Ubuntu versions, and probably most recent Linux distributions.

Posted at 9:30 AM |Comments (2)