quick whs raid question

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orubap

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Nov 3, 2005
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The mobo in my whs box has 8 sata ports, 4 standard and the other 4 using a software raid controller (Silicon Image Sil3114r5), which I'm now looking to make use of as i've maxed out the first 4. Finally installing the driver for these ports this is my forst foray into raid. Using the software it looks like the easiest thing to do would be to create an individual raid group using jbod for each drive I'd connect to these ports and let WHS do its thing. Couple of questions...

1. Any disks that were connected to the Silicon controller using the jbod method - if they were taken out and connected to a standard sata port, would the data on it be readable?

2. Is it possible to get these Silicon Image ports to function as simple sata ports doing away with the raid manager software, so any drives connected would appear directly to the OS.

3. Assuming the answer to two is 'no', whats some recommended 4-8 port non-raid expander card?
 
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Ok, when you boot, you should have a settings option to go in and change various settings in the bios. Go there, dig around and see if you can find a setting to disable the raid. If there is, youre golden, just disable it and be on your way. Alternately, it could be just after post, you have to press a key to enter the Sil setup menu. look in there and see if theres an option if theres not one in youre mobos bios.
 
1. Yes as long as you used single-disk RAID arrays on the fakeRAID controller.

2. Not on Windows-OS. You will be forced to use old and buggy drivers which are no longer maintained.

3. I recommend LSI 1068E; SuperMicro USAS-L8i or Intel SASUC8i; works on all OS and usable for ZFS in the future. It has two Mini-SAS ports allowing you to connect 8 SATA/300 HDDs at full bandwidth.

Please be aware that Silicon Image SiI-3114 is quite a bad controller and all shared with PCI so quite slow as well. Perhaps a PCI-express controller with 8 ports is not that bad so you can avoid this controller altogether.

What kind of motherboard do you have?
 
My understanding of JBOD is the drives are spanned so you won't be able to see to see each individually so you don't want that.

You should have the ability to disable the RAID on that controller and have them work as single SATA ports presented to the OS on that drive controller. You may need that controllers AHCI drivers for this to work.

Even if you can't turn off the RAID which I doubt you could probably not define an array and just leave the drives as single drives attached to that controller which should be presented to the OS.
 
@MaxBurn: the term JBOD is used for several things:
JBOD or Concatenation: simpler version of RAID0; makes one volume out of several disks with no redundancy.

JBOD mode/HBA mode: switch RAID mode off and act as normal HBA presenting just 'a bunch of disks' In this context, JBOD simply means a normal SATA controller without any array; each disk is just a separate disk.

That Silicon Image FakeRAID controller cannot be turned in HBA mode; so you are forced to use their RAID drivers. It also does not support AHCI, and all 4 ports are on PCI bus shared with all other devices. So it's among the crappiest of SATA controllers in existence on the planet.

Still you could be using it, by creating an array for each drive, so you would have 4 RAID arrays each consisting of just one disk in JBOD/RAID0 mode. Then if you install drivers in Windows, you will see the four disks. They might drop out of the RAID on each bad sector or hickup, but that's just something you will have to live with. This is 'old junk' that appeared in old motherboards like this one:
http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=1787

The best solution probably would be a new motherboard with decent onboard ports or an add-on SAS controller like the SuperMicro/Intel one.
 
Cheers for the replies folks.

@maxburn
The simplest raid option in the software is Contiguous (part or whole of one disk) and as sub.mesa suggested I was contempleting making 4 simple raid groups for each disk connected, but my concern then was when the mobo dies would those disks be readable when put into another system, or would I have to waste time sourcing the same Silicon controller to retrieve the data on them, hence my first question.

@sub.mesa
Its a 939socket, MSI K8N Neo4. Showing its age a bit now but for WHS I figure I'd run it till either the mobo or cpu died. And you seem to be right on the money on all points. I have been messing around for a few days now trying to disable the raid and force it to act as a standard sata controller but no joy, good to know I can stop wasting my time. It's somewhat amusing remembering my enthusiam for commisioning this board as a WHS thinking it had 8 standard ports. :rolleyes:

Following the thread I'm leaning towards buying the expander card now but for the time being then I'll go ahead and use the Silicon controller knowing (hoping ;)) the disks would still be swappable - I've no space on the pool and 600 gigs to shuffle.
 
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