Dell CERC SATA 1.5/6Ch Raid Controller

You can use raid with home server but it's unsupported. WHS requires a disk/volume for the OS partition and first data partition. This sholud be a minimum of 80gb. After that the other volumes can be up to 2tb. To use single disks, In the raid bios create 6 raid 0 volumes and initialise each one. They should show up as individual disks. Either way to use the Cerc you will need to get the drivers to install during setup, they will install from a usb stick.

Many thanks Tommo666.

I have had problems with installing the drivers from USB even with the help of Dell Tech Support so ended up slipstreaming the drivers into Server 2003 cd. Not sure how I will get on doing the same with WHS.

 A supplementary question  to the above. Do you know what the maximum drive capacity for the CERC controller and onboard SATA controllers are? I am looking to install 3 x 1.5Tb drives and use the existing 3 x 80Gb drives already in the raid 5 configuration.

Some controllers will only support under 1Tb.

regards

Fozzy

I'm not sure of the drive capacity, the cerc is an older gen card and is sata 1. So there might be a limit. You will have problems slipstreaming drivers into WHS as it uses the vista type winPE boot envoroment for installation. USB is supported as a method for loading drivers as it will ask for a floppy or usb stick with driver during install.

Has any one tried using the CERC SATA 1.5/6Ch Raid card controller with 1.5TB drives?  I already tried partitioning the drives in half, but the drives don't appear available for creating the ARRAY.  I am able to format them with the card, but can't create arrays nor see them when I scan for discs.  Any help/tips appreciated!

You could try a firmware update, the latest one is here. The adaptec site doesn't list the 6 port card but all the other cards using the same chipsets have a max physical disk size of 1tb and array size of 2tb.