Migrate Promise 376 to Highpoint 1540

[Andy Ludgate]

I have set up a mirror on 2x160Gb SATA drives from a Promise 376
onboard RAID controller on my motherboard. It is extremely slow, so
I've been considering purchasing a Highpoint 1540 raid controller
card.

Will the Highpoint accept the two drives that were configured with the
Promise, or am I going to have to reformat and re-install the OS.

Has anybody done this before.

Regards

Andy Ludgate

 

[kony]

I have set up a mirror on 2x160Gb SATA drives from a Promise 376
onboard RAID controller on my motherboard. It is extremely slow, so
I've been considering purchasing a Highpoint 1540 raid controller
card.

Will the Highpoint accept the two drives that were configured with the
Promise, or am I going to have to reformat and re-install the OS.

Has anybody done this before.

Regards

Andy Ludgate

It most likely won't accept the new array. I've not tried moving SATA
arrays from one controller to another but history with PATA is not in your
favor. There is no technical reason why they'd change the proprietary
method of assigning arrays (which is writing some data in the last few
sector(s) of each drive IIRC) for SATA instead of PATA, at least none that
I'm aware of.

Are you sure the Highpoint will make a signficant difference?
What is "extremely slow"?

Is it possible you have PCI bus "issues", and since either controller
would be on the PCI bus you're still facing the same issues with the
Highpoint?

 

[Bubba]

Andy Ludgate's log on stardate 13 ožu 2004

I have set up a mirror on 2x160Gb SATA drives from a Promise 376
onboard RAID controller on my motherboard. It is extremely slow, so
I've been considering purchasing a Highpoint 1540 raid controller
card.

What type of RAID do you use? And who is the manufacturer of drives?

 

[Paul H]

if they are mirrored, you just need to set up the array and boot from one of
the drives - the raid array won't be recognised by the new controller but it
will then remirror the second drive in the background. There is no need to
reformat or reinstall the OS

 

[DaveW]

Reformat and reinstall.

 

[Andy Ludgate]

Thanks guys

I got my 1540 yesterday and installed it. I attempted to configure
the array and duplicate one disk to the other, but it failed at about
90% .

So I just created a new mirror, ghosted back an image I made earlier,
and then went through a windows install/repair.

Everythings working now, but not quite as fast as I was hoping.
Si-Soft Sandra gives me a drive index of 27,226kB/s , where with the
onboard promise I was getting around 17,000kB/s .

However sisoft shows I should expect around 54,3441kB/s for a SATA
120GB 7,200 rpm 2x RAiD (I've got 7,200 rpm 160GB 2xRaid). Although
maybe it's because I'm mirrored whereas the test shows results for
striped, and I will not get 2x write speed, just 2x read speed.

thanks for your input.

Andy