Hardware RAID card to replace mirrored sw RAID?

[lawpoop]

Hello --

Looking for a SATA hardware RAID card that does mirroring ( I don't need anything more at this point ). Advice?

Long story short, the on-board Intel software raid was throwing errors under Windows XP. I pulled each drive and used the manufacturer's drive test utility. Each passed with flying colors. ( I got the same errors with either drive in the machine, which is why I think the sw raid is the problem )

When I went to rebuild the set, the machine bluescreened shortly after the rebuild started. I broke the raid and tried to boot from either drive, but no luck. I tried to make a new raid, but the drivers for the raid controller do not come with windows. The machine has no floppy drive and no *connector* for a floppy drive, and I had no slipstreamed install disk, so I figured I was out of luck for the raid. I disabled the raid settings and installed straight to the hard drive.

I'm looking for a hardware RAID card to avoid these issues. I don't want to slipstream or floppy a driver in case I need to install. And I don't want windows mucking around with my RAID in case it's rebuilding. Will hardware raid allow me to avoid these issues?

 

[keenan]

Any RAID card you want to boot from will require you to use an F6 driver on Windows. Or almost any, anyway, there are drivers for some included, but not likely anything you're going to use. You can use a USB floppy drive, or in Vista/Seven a USB disk. Hardware RAID will usually handle rebuilding on its own regardless of what the OS is doing, but a powerloss etc. in the middle of a rebuild is still risky if you don't have a battery backup. And most reasonably priced RAID cards are fakeraid too, so you have the same issues you have with the Intel ICHxR. You'd have to spend at least a few hundred bucks to get something better.

a) This is probably just a driver issue. Try a few different drivers until you find one that's stable. RAID-1 should be recoverable no matter what the controller does anyway, as long as it doesn't totally munge up the disk, which I think is unlikely. I've even done this with the ICHxR hardware RAID1 before and it's worked fine when both disks failed I was able to pull some usable data off the individual disks.

 

[bacon]

I was having problems a while back and simply updated the console software and it fixed it.