RAID 5 and XP

[Randy Miller]

I just got a new Chaintech ZNF3-150 motherboard which was supposed to
have SATA RAID 5 support, but didn't.... I ended up buying a High
Point RocketRAID 1640 controller and that works fine, but never having
run one before, I have some general questions that some of the experts
here may be able to answer, if you would be so kind..

I went into the High Point RAID bios setup and set up the RAID 5
configuration, initializing the drives at that time, and then booted
off a Win98SE disk and made my partitions... I use FAT32, so I can see
the drive from Win98 as well as XP. When I go into XP's drive
manager, it says it's not Fault Tolerant... Isn't that what RAID 5 is
all about? Just to see if it made any difference, I deleted that
partition and used XP's drive manager, to partition and format the
array to NTFS, but I still don't see it listed as Fault Tolerant..

My second quandry is with the RAID Manager Console software.... I
notice that it doesn't run and "Connect" to the drive, without me
manually firing it up and logging onto the drive... Is that normal?
Do I need to add this to the startup folder, and if so, how do I make
it log onto the drive automatically? The book, nor the help files
answer either of these questions, unfortunately!

FWIW, I just copied a few gb of files over onto the array and it all
seems to be working, even without being "logged onto the drive".

 

[=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Mark=B2=B0=B0=B3?=]

Randy Miller wrote:

I went into the High Point RAID bios setup and set up the RAID 5
configuration, initializing the drives at that time, and then booted
off a Win98SE disk and made my partitions... I use FAT32, so I can see
the drive from Win98 as well as XP. When I go into XP's drive
manager, it says it's not Fault Tolerant... Isn't that what RAID 5 is
all about? Just to see if it made any difference, I deleted that
partition and used XP's drive manager, to partition and format the
array to NTFS, but I still don't see it listed as Fault Tolerant..

My second quandry is with the RAID Manager Console software.... I
notice that it doesn't run and "Connect" to the drive, without me
manually firing it up and logging onto the drive... Is that normal?
Do I need to add this to the startup folder, and if so, how do I make
it log onto the drive automatically? The book, nor the help files
answer either of these questions, unfortunately!

<snip>
Seems like it's all running OK. The array is controlled by the raid
bios, XP will see it as a single device; you can format, partition or
whatever as normal. As for the Raid Manager Console, this is only
required when you want to carry out maintenance on the array,
synchronisation etc.

 

[Bennett Price]

Start the PC with one of the RAID drives disconnected. You should get
some beeps or alarms to tell you something is amiss but XP should start
normally. Then power down, reconnect the drive, and it should rebuild
(or let you rebuild).

XP probably doesn't about fault tolerance because you haven't used XP to
build software fault tolerance.

 

[Randy Miller]

Thanks, Mark! I thought that was the case, but wasn't sure

 

[Randy Miller]

Ahh.... and by letting it rebuild while under XP, it'll show it as
being Fault tolerant? Thanks! On second thought, I guess I won't
worry about what XP thinks... it's not the sharpest knife in the
drawer anyhow

 

[DaveW]

You never said how many harddrives you used to set up the RAID 5 array. You
obviously know that the minimum number of Identically sized harddrives for a
RAID 5 array is three harddrives.