If you only have one hard drive, there is no purpose for doing this, Dell shipped many single hard drive PC's set up as raid in the bios, no one knows why, there is nothing wrong with ATA mode, and there is No performance hit either.
-- This is more of a information post for others to find by searching, than more questions --
I'm adding a 2nd identical sata drive so RAID XYZ would be possible from a spindle perspective anyway. It's just a general amazement that there's no easy way to do this. BTW the Intel matrix raid driver won't even install if it doesn't see the raid config so I can't even install the driver. This doesn't make sense to me.
My interest is for resilience via RAID 1 (mirror), which I'm not heart broken to not have RAID 1 as an option since some failures are where the OS mangles the file system and you'd loose both drives anyway.
Another tactic of nightly scheduled image of the primary drive to a 2nd drive is not a bad option. Acronis True Image can do this. It does mean you need to swap drives or depending, buy another drive and restore the image, which means the time to repair is several hours to a day
I'm not pitching Acronis, but there is another theoretical option to do this:
- Image your current system in IDE mode with Acronis Workstation with Universal Restore.
- Get the Matrix drivers on a CD/floppy.
- Enable RAID in the bios
- Restore on top of your disk from the backup with Acronis WS + Universal Restore
Put the driver CD in when prompted and Acronis knows how to stuff a new driver and HAL layer into the kernel during the restore.
- Boot the OS and in theory the windows kernel now runs the matrix (XYZ) HBA driver and will know how to deal with the RAID chip etc.
I've done this with an IDE restore where the from system had a different driver and Acronis UR figured out the new driver upon restore to new HW.
This is too much risk for this box, an important server, and I don't have this time. I was looking for a 15 minute process and reboot to move to RAID... :) Is any admin step with windows only 15 minutes? LOL!!
C3PO5
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2.7K Posts
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July 10th, 2007 04:00
mombodog
2 Intern
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12.7K Posts
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July 10th, 2007 20:00
curt504
3 Posts
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July 10th, 2007 20:00
I'm adding a 2nd identical sata drive so RAID XYZ would be possible from a spindle perspective anyway. It's just a general amazement that there's no easy way to do this. BTW the Intel matrix raid driver won't even install if it doesn't see the raid config so I can't even install the driver. This doesn't make sense to me.
My interest is for resilience via RAID 1 (mirror), which I'm not heart broken to not have RAID 1 as an option since some failures are where the OS mangles the file system and you'd loose both drives anyway.
Another tactic of nightly scheduled image of the primary drive to a 2nd drive is not a bad option. Acronis True Image can do this. It does mean you need to swap drives or depending, buy another drive and restore the image, which means the time to repair is several hours to a day
I'm not pitching Acronis, but there is another theoretical option to do this:
- Image your current system in IDE mode with Acronis Workstation with Universal Restore.
- Get the Matrix drivers on a CD/floppy.
- Enable RAID in the bios
- Restore on top of your disk from the backup with Acronis WS + Universal Restore
Put the driver CD in when prompted and Acronis knows how to stuff a new driver and HAL layer into the kernel during the restore.
- Boot the OS and in theory the windows kernel now runs the matrix (XYZ) HBA driver and will know how to deal with the RAID chip etc.
I've done this with an IDE restore where the from system had a different driver and Acronis UR figured out the new driver upon restore to new HW.
This is too much risk for this box, an important server, and I don't have this time. I was looking for a 15 minute process and reboot to move to RAID... :) Is any admin step with windows only 15 minutes? LOL!!
Good luck to folks, curt