ICH9R RAID question

[WintersFury]

Ok, so I did some work on my desktop which I'm turning into a DVR / File Server. And I currently have 5 750gb WD Green drives in it (2794.5 gig according to the array manager). So I set up my array all nice and it just keeps saying Initialize in the status area and no in the bootable area.

Now I'm thinking it's just having to go through and set up the parity and all for the drives so that might be what the current problem. But my drive rack doesn't seem to be indicating any access, though I have to admit I'm not 100% sure on that.

So you guys know anything about the initializing? And if it will in fact go to bootable once it's done?

Thanks!

 

[Syntax Error]

It always takes a long time to initialize RAID5 arrays, especially something like 5 750GB drives. Since you're doing this on onboard RAID, the offload parity calculations are going to be on the CPU itself rather than any RAID controller, and personally, I wouldn't trust any decent RAID5 setup to software RAID, but that's just me.

 

[WintersFury]

Thanks for confirming that it is just taking a while to set up.

As for using the onboard RAID on the mobo. It's saving me a decent bit of cash in not getting a raid card. And the data on the discs isn't so important that it can't be lost.

It's mainly going to be a DVR / Media Server and the raid 5 is just so I have a chance of not losing all the TV shows I'm going to keep around so I don't have to try and re record them again.


If the data was more important than that I agree with getting a dedicated RAID card. And this used to be my gaming computer till I got a laptop and now I'm just trying to get it in use for something.

Someday I'll set it up as a more proper server, either that or the next one I build when this thing dies.

 

[zanthius]

Did you get this fixed after all? I'm having exactly the same issue.

What did you do?

Thanks

 

[jasonlitka]

Did you get this fixed after all? I'm having exactly the same issue.

What did you do?

Thanks

Not sure what part of the problem you're referring to but the reason it's not bootable is because +2TB volumes require a GPT partition table and you can only boot from a MSDOS partition table. If you've got a large raid array you need to carve out a small volume to boot from and then use the remainder for storage.

Of course, I couldn't say how to do that as I've never used Intel's ICHxR (fakeraid controllers should never, in my opinion, be trusted to anything but RAID 1 and RAID 0 you don't care about)