Two PCI RAID cards problem

I'm trying to add more storage to my aging server. It uses a Tyan Tiger K8W mainboard. It had a PCI RAID card in it which I'm not sure of the manufacturer but uses a SiI 3112 chip with two 250GB drives in RAID1. We wanted to add another RAID1 to expand storage and keep two different data sets separated so we bought a Promise Fasttrack TX2300. The problem is the two darn things won't work at the same time; only one or the other. If I set the PCI enumeration order to "ascend" it finds one card but if I set it to "descend" it finds the other and the BIOS is not loaded for the opposite card. I've tried putting the cards in in several different orders and it does the same sort of thing. Any advice? Will these two cards simply not work together?

They may not work together unfortunately. RAID cards usually have to be made to work with more than one in the system.

Ha! Tyan strikes again!

I struggled with this for a long, long time with my Tyan board, which had *three* storage adapters on it - on-board scsi, off-board ide, and off-board sata. It would only detect one or two adapters, depending on what BIOS settings I changed. I finally gave up and took out the off-board ide.

Your best bet is to put the Promise card in another machine. Create another raid array on it, and copy the data from the Tyan machine to it. Then move the new card and array to the Tyan box, put the old drives on the card, and initialize a new array. Make sense?

I think I follow what you're suggesting but should I give up hope on getting both of them to work together? That was the intention, you know, to expand on the existing space

Unfortunately, I don't think you'll be able to get two cards working at once on that board. So what you could do is get a cheap 4-port card and replace the two cards with one. Or move to an 8-port card for future expandability, if you're worried about that. It's more than five times as expensive, though.

Thanks, unhappy mage. I did already tell the owner there was a chance we might need to buy a 4-port card if I couldn't get it all working.

Originally Posted by cmshowers

I think I follow what you're suggesting but should I give up hope on getting both of them to work together? That was the intention, you know, to expand on the existing space

Not abandon all hope, but you're probably going to spend more time on it than it's reasonably worth at this point. Better off to create a fresh volume that has all the space you'll need for a decent amount of time....