WD360 Raptor Raid 0 problems..I think

[FoeHammer]

Okay so I've put together a new computer and all the hardware is working correctly and heres the specs:

2.4ghz p4
2 gigs of Twinx Corsair DDR 400
Asus P4C800D (i875 Canterwood)
2 WD360 Raptors SATA

Okay so I set up or tried to set it up as RAID 0, I set up the array rebooted, and made sure to set up the Bios correctly. Everything fine a this point. I copy my Promise 378 drivers from my support cd to a floppy. as well as make a floppy disk with the FDISK utility. here where i think I messed things up I ran FDISK, did some kind of partition thing I think...I jus followed the likely choices. Now i reboot and weet up windows from CD, press f6 to install 3rd party drivers and such then I choose the XP drivers. I start installing windows and it partitions 2 drives one was 68 gigs one was 2 gigs? I'm not sure why it did this? Culd it be the fdisk utility? I made the the drives as NTFS. Okay nad heres another thing when I look at the drive properties of both they say something like promise SCSI drives, shouldn't it say SATA drives or is windows getting confused and thinking they are SCSI drives? any help would be great.

 

[Bludshot]

I set up my machine over last weekend (5/9).

I used Win XP to do all disk partitioning and formatting. I was careful to select exactly how much room I wanted for each partition. I allowed the Promise Fastbuild utility to autocreate my RAID array as a 2+0 array with 64KB stripes. If I re-do it, I'll probably go to smaller stripe size.

After hours of installing software, I put the finishing touches on the system by installing the latest nVidia driver for the graphics card. After the subsequent reboot, my RAID array came up "offline". This is most definitely NOT a good thing. I had been rebooting like crazy without incident and then blam. I spent Sunday browsing the web for explanations, manuals, whatever. The online documentation at the manufacturers' websites (WD, ASUS, Promise) was decidedly insufficient. I couldn't find a reference to Promise's SATA20378 chip anywhere on their site.

I found that SATA RAID channel 2 was showing up as "failed or disconnected". If I pulled the power off of Channel 1 (not during operation), then channel 2 would show up fine. It seemed the problem was in the RAID controller. Both drives showed up fine on the basic (non-RAID) SATA channels. Bottom line, I knew I could reinstall everything. In fact, this was the best time to have a problem crop up. Yet, I was still hopeful that my work would not be completely undone.

I found a reference on the Promise website for a different version of the RAID utility that had similar screens. It mentioned deleting an array and recreating it without re-initializing the drives (re-initializing = destroying the data). I gave it a shot, although I wasn't sure I was doing it properly... slightly different software interface. The new array showed up as "functional". Hurray!

I crossed my fingers, rebooted and Win XP came up quick as you please. I've rebooted repeatedly since then, but I'm still curious what caused the problem and whether or not it will repeat. If it does, at least I know how to fix it.

I am mighty pleased with the performance increases I've seen over my last system (P2-350).


By the way, Windows recognizes your standard IDE drives as such and labels anything else SCSI. This is not a problem, just short-sighted naming by the original programmers.

 

[Lord Evermore]

I just have to say "you bastard" for being able to buy 2 Raptors and then RAIDing them for even more performance over my simple one 7200RPM drive.

 

[GnomeCop]

so instead of 64k strpes hat size would be good? I'll probably be setting up my dual raptors tomorrow and I hope I dont run into any of these problems. (probably will)

I'll probably just use my onboard Silicon Image satalink controller

 

[Bludshot]

I've seen people claiming better benchmark numbers for smaller stripe sizes, but I think it all depends on the application. I can't give you a definitive answer (I'm won't claim to be any authority on this one). I think more information will be available as more people use this hardware. You probably can't go wrong if you stay with the default.

Look out for corruption of your data if you are using the onboard SI SATA for RAID on an nforce2 mobo. They may have a fix for it by now, but the shipped hardware had issues (could be fixed in the BIOS?). There's lots of info at the forums on http://www.nforcershq.com

Good luck to you!

 

[GnomeCop]

thankfully I'm not using an nforce 2 motherboard. I have a p4, and I am using an intelmotherboard. hope I dont have any problems with the SI controller.

in the meantime, I just crossing my fingers and waiting for the mail.