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PERC 5/i Integrated battery dead - does it matter for very small business?
Hi.
About to install a 2nd hand PE2950 which came with a PERC 5/i Integrated RAID card. The PERC cache battery is no more. Not even detected.
It has 3 137gb SAS drives, which I've used to create a RAID5 272Gb disc, split into 2 partitions - 25 Gb for Windows 2003 Srv R2 SP2, and the rest for a data partition.
It's for a small business of 6 people and they'll just use it for file sharing, and weekly client>server backups, before the server completes its nightly usb>tape drive backup. Nothing else, not even printing.
So it automatically set itself to write-through, which I know impacts disk performance.
My question is, for such a small level of use, am I going to notice this?
Also, I've seen that sometimes you can force a battery re-learn - but in this case it's not even detected. It's there though....
Thanks all,
DELL-Chris H
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May 15th, 2012 06:00
Will,
You can survive without the battery, but that means there is no power in case of a failure to write the cache data tot he drives, which can cause issues.
On a side note, what is the driver and firmware for the Perc 5/i? If it is out of date in can cause false errors as well. Which may be the situation.
Also, if you decide in the future to replace it the part number is DFJRV.
pcmeiners
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May 15th, 2012 08:00
In the stone age of raid, circa early 90s, very few raid servers purchased by small business could afford to go for the cache battery option. I personally ran approx 12 clients with raids at the time ,write back enabled, no cache battery... can't remember ever lossing data. On the other hand, it not a pretty picture when your responsible for data loss, which is a possibility without the battery,
Without write back, there is a definite loss of throughput, very noticeable if the disk system is accessed often. If your 6 user are only using simple programs such as in MS Office, you can live with write through, as your server is slightly utilized. During backups the disks are heavyly utilized. so the backups wll take longer.
pcmeiners
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May 16th, 2012 14:00
Unless you are getting the exact error message as per the MS link, I would not install it.
Will__S
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May 16th, 2012 02:00
OpenManage tells me the following:
Firmware Version 5.2.2-0072
Driver Version 2.24.00.32
Storport Driver Version 5.2.3790.3959
Minimum Required Storport Driver Version 5.2.3790.4173
I downloaded the latest driver from Dell, I think.
I updated the firmware to the latest version.
I have downloaded the Hotfix but it does warn me about installing it - should I?
(http://support.microsoft.com/kb/943545)
?
Ta.