Formatting RAID 10 intel software raid

While Intel might say its RAID 10 it might as well be 0+1 in reality. Google some to find out. If its true then you should be able to use dmraid without trouble (*) as it will sense the metadata on your disks and figure out what the correct RAID configuration is and simply use its own implementation instead, but with knowing all the important factors known as stripesize, offset, metadata location, disk order and disk size. Without these a correct RAID implementation may not be possible, so that's why dmraid needs to 'know your brand' and be able to read its configuration format.

However, I would also like to note that there is the possibility of things going wrong, for example the sensing of the metadata needed to activate the array. While you may thing a RAID10 or 0+1 is safe, the RAID engine itself is an additional point of failure and if it fails, having lots of redundancy will not help. So i would advise to focus on backups instead, as they protect against alot more dangers than RAID can, for example filesystem corruption. Which happens, in particular, with the Intel windows RAID-drivers (ICHxR southbridge) with the 'write caching' option enabled - this will create a write-back buffer in the RAM which can speed up I/O considerably, but at the cost of possible data and/or filesystem corruption should the system crash while you're doing heavy I/O. FYI. :)