SC400, on-board SATA controllers & RAID

Question

My

pearsons_11114 · Answer

Let's try that again.   I have two new SATA drives for my SC400. Everythings seems to work fine. They do not need special drivers under Win2003 anyway. However, I don't see anything in the downloads for RAID drivers for this setup. The hardware seems to be exactly the same as in my P670, where I have two SATA drives under RAID 0. The only difference seems to be that the BIOS on the SC400 does not have the switch to turn on the RAID BIOS (which presumably is not there either). Within the limits of my understanding of how this stuff works, it appears that the hardware is completely capable of RAID, but Dell did not include the proper BIOS. Can anyone enlighten me?   (I think installing a RAID controller card would be pointless as it's PCI, which would be a bottleneck. I couldn't even find a card out there for a PCI slot).

Dev Mgr · Answer

The bios doesn't offer raid capabilities. None of the Dell servers offer the Intel raid capabilities. Dell opts to use CERC cards or PERC cards (or integrated equivalents of these), but not bios-based (sometimes referred to/considered southbridge/IO-chip) raid.

pearsons_11114 · Answer

Ok, so it's a separate deal from the SATA controller. My P670 has integrated CERC, which is what enables RAID. The SC400 does not have this hardware, so no RAID. Thx.

PowerEdge HDD/SCSI/RAID

SC400, on-board SATA controllers & RAID

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