On Wed, Oct 7, 2009 at 14:32, Andrew S. Zbikowski <andyzib at gmail.com> wrote: > The 3ware Escalade is a hardware RAID card. You create the array using > the 3ware's firmware. The 3ware card then presents the array to Linux > (or any OS) as a single SCSI, PATA, or SATA drive. You won't see the > individual drives in the OS without software provided by the RAID > card's vendor. in this case the 3w-xxxx module which drives the 3ware escalade 6000, 7000 and 8000 cards is already in the linux kernel since the 2.4 days and no additional software is needed. it presents a single SCSI device for each RAID set defined in the 3ware bios the tw_cli and 3dmd software packages provided by AMC/3ware are optional though highly recommended to monitor the array. and can be used to make modifications to the array at runtime but not while the array is active(mounted) and not without destroying the data on disk. (you cannot add drives to the array or reconfigure the array)