Several ST Lab controllercards?

[Damodred]

Hello

Im building a new backupserver. It will be based on Windows Server 2003 and software raid5. I know that software raid5 can span over several controllercards but how does a computer work with more than one controllercard of the same kind? I have decided to go for two ST Lab PCI-E Sata2 controllercards because they have real Win2003drivers. Will this work? I remember some years ago I had two cheap Promise controllercards (more or less just more IDE-ports) and if I had both in the computer would just stand and boot these two cards in an eternal loop. Another question, I was looking at the ST Lab manual over this controllercard. It says that I need a floppy diskdrive to properly install the drivers. First of, the drivers comes on a cd and second I don't have a floppy. Anyone who tried ST Labs controllercards before, can you confirm that this is really needed?


Thanks in advance :)

[swatbat]

Are you planning on booting off the raid 5?

If you are booting off a single disk or a raid 1 off the motherboard then it shouldn't matter. As far as the drivers go if they are not on the windows 2k3 cd then yes the only way to load drivers is to load them via a floppy drive so it can see the drives on the controller. This is only needed if you are booting off a drive on said controller. You just copy the drivers to a floppy disk off the cd. I keep a usb floppy drive around just for this.

As far as the software raid going accross multiple cards it shouldn't matter.

[Damodred]

Ah yes, no Im not planning to boot from it. Decided to go with a simple motherboard controlled raid1 for that. Its just for some storage. Just did a minor test, seems like BIOS doesnt even detect the card (or it goes so fast that I cant see it) during boot but Windows found a new hardware scsi control upon logon so I suppose this could work. Still waiting for the second card and the last two harddrives.

Thanks for the help :)