AMD SB750 RAID or Software?

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XFreeRollerX

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Jul 20, 2008
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Okay well here is the rundown
about 5 months ago I tried to do RAID in my home server and it failed miserably due to AMD's inability to make onboard RAID solutions successful for me.

Basically two 100% new and good condition drives (tested them individually) would not work together in RAID 1 on my motherboard. I kept getting errors for drive failure then the system would rebuild the array then I wouldn't have a server for 3-4 hours at a time cus it was so slow

Since that happened I just ran the OS on one disk and had a nightly software that xfrd a bunch of folder dir's to the second drive. This has been working flawlessly, but I'm planning on adding more drives and wonder... is software mirroring have any real downsides? I like that everything is separate but there's no real purpose for it.

Ideas?


also: You last visited: 12-31-2009 :D been a while since I've logged in
 
Depends on the OS you are using.

If you are using any version of Windows, you must use FakeRAID (SB750 RAID).

If it is a Linux/Unix distro or OS X you should use software RAID.

I prefer software RAID due to it's advantages over FlexRAID, but performance-wise they are very similar.
 
You'll want FlexRAID then.

One thing, make sure the drivers are installed while you install the OS, rather than after.

AMD FlexRAID uses AHCI, so if you have installed the OS with just the basic ATA drivers, then Windows may have a BSOD.

FlexRAID is just fine for RAID 0, 1, 0+1 or 10, but not so good for RAID 5 or 6. At that point, software or hardware RAID should be used.
 
so I would have to re-install windows? Not too sure about that :(

Also, I just realized the two drives I might be getting are 2.0GB WD Greens while my existing 2TB is WD Black..

so this means I would keep the OS drive on the black, and have everything mirrored to the two 2TB greens via redundant array, put these on FlexRAID?

also when I was using RAID on OS and AMD SB i used windows built in drivers and it was fine up until it would think it failed then rebuild. Tried again with AMD SB Drivers and no go. I have never heard of FakeRAID as pre-install drivers so I'm a bit skeptic about them... however i read the wiki page on it and it sounds promising.. comments?
 
I just did it to another machine with FakeRAID, RAID 1, and two WD Green drives on an AMD SB 650. I loaded the drivers during the OS install.

However, in your case, if you want the OS on the WD Black drive, then you don't need to reinstall the OS.
Just install the WD Green drives, make sure the BIOS is set to AHCI (AMD RAID) and then load up the OS. If Windows doesn't automatically find your drives, then try loading the drivers from there.

FakeRAID relies on drivers to run the controller card/chip through the CPU, so having the drivers loaded before the install of a fresh OS is necessary for it to work, unless the OS already has drivers built in.
 
What about Windows Server 2008? I have a RAID1 configuration, just using the Windows Server virtual disk manager. The motherboard does not have any kind of RAID support (as I recall).
 
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