Win Server 2012 and PCIe raid controllers

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Fark_Maniac

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I'm admin for a very small non-profit. I built them a server years ago, but as I'm upgrading to Server 2012 Essentials, I'm also going to move the drives to a PCIe Raid card. Looking through Newegg offerings, for the lower end cards (SATA II, 2 internal ports)...the highest OS level advertised is server 2008.

So, I guess what I'm trying to find out, if the card says it'll support windows server 2008....would it do 2012 as well?

I'll only be doing raid 1 for mirroring.
 
Maybe...maybe not.

The cheaper the card, then most likely the worse the support and drivers.

Go on ebay, get an LSI card for around $100 and be done and headache free.
 
Why do you need a raid controller for 2 ports? What's wrong with the motherboard's RAID options? Or heck software RAID 1 it if you have to in Disk Manager.
 
the motherboard's onboard raid has had one failed port already and so I just don't trust it. Also, the motherboard is a socket 940...790 chipset I believe. I don't know if there are raid drivers & management software for Win2012.

Window's native software raid does not raid the boot sector...so if you lose the "master" disk, you cannot boot from the mirrored disk...at least as it works in Win7.
 
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Perhaps you should first investigate drivers for the motherboard, if there are issues with those, you may be looking to replace the motherboard.
 
So in my testing I've determined that the EFI System Partition & the Recovery Partition cannot be mirrored but the boot sector is mirrored just fine.

After mirroring the C: drive (it contains the boot sector) I rebooted and was presented with the option of booting to either drive. I then shut down the server and removed the 1st disk but the system would not boot.

So I tried again with a BIOS based installation instead of EFI (Hyper-V Gen 1 is BIOS, Gen 2 is EFI)

This installation produces only a C: drive and a System Reserved Drive. I mirrored both of those and rebooted and was presented with options to boot from either drive.

I shutdown, removed the primary drive and started it up. I selected the second drive and the system booted just fine.

In conclusion you can software RAID1 Server 2012 (R2) so long as you don't have an EFI installation...with an old motherboard that shouldn't be an issue, you should be BIOS based. With a new motherboard you'll have RAID built in.
 
I did Google around and it can be done with EFI but it's way more complicated than I think anyone actually wants to do...it's cheaper to just buy the RAID controller if your time is worth anything haha.
 
Fark_Maniac said:
the motherboard's onboard raid has had one failed port already and so I just don't trust it. Also, the motherboard is a socket 940...790 chipset I believe. I don't know if there are raid drivers & management software for Win2012.

Window's native software raid does not raid the boot sector...so if you lose the "master" disk, you cannot boot from the mirrored disk...at least as it works in Win7.
Click to expand...

Why are they still using a MB with a bad port?
I would have replaced it the asap as soon as it went out.
 
MysticRyuujin said:
So in my testing I've determined that the EFI System Partition & the Recovery Partition cannot be mirrored but the boot sector is mirrored just fine.

After mirroring the C: drive (it contains the boot sector) I rebooted and was presented with the option of booting to either drive. I then shut down the server and removed the 1st disk but the system would not boot.

So I tried again with a BIOS based installation instead of EFI (Hyper-V Gen 1 is BIOS, Gen 2 is EFI)

This installation produces only a C: drive and a System Reserved Drive. I mirrored both of those and rebooted and was presented with options to boot from either drive.

I shutdown, removed the primary drive and started it up. I selected the second drive and the system booted just fine.

In conclusion you can software RAID1 Server 2012 (R2) so long as you don't have an EFI installation...with an old motherboard that shouldn't be an issue, you should be BIOS based. With a new motherboard you'll have RAID built in.
Click to expand...
Wow, that is amazing that you tested that far. It is an older bios based board, I may have to try to play around.

stormy1 said:
Why are they still using a MB with a bad port?
I would have replaced it the asap as soon as it went out.
Click to expand...
Because I'm conscientious about a group that has severely limited funds. I'm donating my time, and moving to another port that works just fine seemed like the right answer. 1 year later, it is working just fine. Utilization on this server is pretty low, At best, 20 hits on the web site. We use a free mail program for a distribution list to members. This is small beans computing, but getting off of XP is forcing my upgrade hand. As a non-profit, we get Win2012 Essentials for $30 through TechSoup.org.


When I first started looking at the lower end controllers, i was just going to research SATAII cards, since that's all the drives would handle. By an errand search, I included SATAIII cards and many of them do support Win2012. I makes sense...newer tech cards will have newer drivers for new OS levels. I found this guy for $20: http://www.sybausa.com/productInfo.php?iid=1104 Lots of good reviews on newegg. Probably going this route and be done with it.
 
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