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New to RAID and SCSI...need help :-(

K

karmasore

Weaksauce
Joined
Mar 1, 2005
Messages
68
Hello everyone,

Last night, my brother gave me some computer gear and included in his offering was a SCSI card and two 10,000 RPM SCSI hard drives. I've never experimented with SCSI before, so I'm wondering how I go about setting up a RAID array with them.

I installed the SCSI card (an Adaptec AHA-2940UW) and the two SCSI hard drives (after disconnecting my existing 200gb IDE hard drive just in case) and formated one of the drives and installed WinXP. Both drives are fast and are recognized by Windows. However, when I boot up my PC, my onboard (?) NVIDIA RAID thinger tells me that it can't find a RAID array and that RAID is disabled (i think this pops up everytime the computer boots regardless) and then right after it tells me that, my SCSI card prompts that I can access it's settings by hitting Ctrl-A. This sits there for a long time and then windows eventually loads.

I know I can turn off the SCSI card prompt within it's settings. But what I can't figure out is how to set up a RAID array using my SCSI card and two SCSI hard drives. In my motherboard BIOS (Gigabyte GA-K8NSC-939), it lists options to set up an IDE or SATA array (probably because the motherboard has IDE and SATA inputs on it).

What do I do! Can anyone help me out? I just wanna set up a RAID array using these two really fast hard drives :(

Any help is appreciated!

Thanks ;)

-J-
 
That particular scsi card is not a RAID card, so you can't setup an array with it (*edit*)using hardware raid. All you've been doing in the BIOS of your system is changing the RAID settings for the onboard raid controller.
 
The onboard raid and the scsi raid card are seperate. You'll want to configure the array by hitting ctrl-A as you mentioned. Then the array will be recognized by Windows and everything.

 
defakto said:
That particular scsi card is not a RAID card, so you can't setup an array with it. All you've been doing in the BIOS of your system is changing the RAID settings for the onboard raid controller.
Click to expand...


Ah...ok. That makes sense.

Too bad :-(

I suppose I could just run both HD's anyways AND my 200gb.

Do you recommend a specific SCSI RAID card?

-J-
 
The Adaptec 2940UW does not have a RAID BIOS. You need to run software RAID with it.
 
DougLite said:
The Adaptec 2940UW does not have a RAID BIOS. You need to run software RAID with it.
Click to expand...

hmm, ok...but how do i go about doing that?

i was under the impression that an array had to be recognized while booting up...
 
Different cards have their strong and weak points, you'll really have to decided if you want to spend the money, what type of benifit you are looking to gain from raid, then check out which cards will get you the best bang for your buck. Scsi can get expensive real quick and if you've never touched it before it can get a bit confusing at times.
 
defakto said:
Different cards have their strong and weak points, you'll really have to decided if you want to spend the money, what type of benifit you are looking to gain from raid, then check out which cards will get you the best bang for your buck. Scsi can get expensive real quick and if you've never touched it before it can get a bit confusing at times.
Click to expand...

yeah...i'm a broke college student so my funds are limited. like really limited.

anyways, DougLite suggested running software RAID with my specific card...any info on how that is done?
 
Software raid is usually not installed on your boot drive, at least i know it's not for windows. So if that's where you're looking to put it you are out of luck. Do a quick f1 with windows xp/2k help and a search for software raid should have directions.
 
also, what kind of performance should i expect from running software RAID versus running hardware RAID?
 
ok, ive done a little research on this and from what i understand, the way i would set this up would be like this:

- install winxp on 200 gb ide drive
- install both scsi drives and card
- in winxp, set up the two scsi cards as a RAID array

only thing that sucks about this is that i really wanted winxp on the array :(

too bad.

after looking at scsi raid cards online, ive realized that they are far too expensive for me.

this sucks!

;)

-J-
 
I've got some older scsi raid controllers(I believe 80M/ channel instead of 40 that adaptec gets) one is a 2 channel, one is a 3 channel, and i also have a single channel u160 controller that is 64 bit pci (will work in 32 bit though, i've had it running before) that i'd part with for pretty cheap. i'd be willing to sell any of them really, they'd be a touch faster than the card you are using, and you could boot off them, I know at least two of them work, drop me a pm if you've got a real interest in it and I can break one out and do some testing on it to make sure it runs slippery smooth, package it up, and ship it out.
 
Windows 2000 or XP system and boot volumes may be on simple or mirrored volumes on dynamic disks. System or boot volumes may not be spanned, striped, or striped with parity. It is an enforcement of a "best practice" that the Windows NT system/boot volume should be on only one physical disk. Obviously, it has not way of enforcing this on a hardware RAID array, as the RAID array appears as a single logical drive, and only the RAID BIOS addresses the indivdual members directly.
 
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