Planning to rebuild my 20TB WHS Flexraid server: Information requested. - Page 20

I just have not had much time. If I did it I would want to do it well.

I am wondering if I should just edit the first post of this thread and change the title versus making a new one ?

This thread had lots of info from my journey.

Nope

I got back an external retail box with power cable and USB cord. They obviously knew it was external unit originally.

All I sent was my bare drive.

RMA process is automated and done online.

I guess there's a chance they could reject it but I had luck. I did it twice with two MFGs.

Sorry I just missed it.

Your all set ?

When you flash it to IT mode I don't use any card boot screens. The IBM is transparent. My Z77 Asrock just goes right into windows or WHS. All the drives show. The first time it took a while. They populated one at a time. (I have 8)

WHS has native support and drivers for the IBM card. Once it's flashed you should just be able to slap it into your x8 slot and use it. There is nothing you need to do to configure it.

It will be basically transparent and provide 8 sata ports. No RAID. No configuring. No menus in BIOS.

Just plug in your drives and your good.

What cables to you need ??

I have some extra's I'll sell. Brand new.

I have 2 SAS to 4 SATA ports foward cables I'll sell. Basically the 8087 end goes into the IBM and it breaks out to 4 SATA ports for going to a HDD. I have 2, one for each port on the IBM. I used for 2 weeks.
Intel branded blue ones. Pictures earlier in this thread. With those you could run 8 HDD's and have 8 Sata ports.

I upgraded my case to the Norco 4220 and I only need an 8087 to 8087 SAS cable now. (I have extra those too)

Lots of info but I am unsure of your specific question. I guess your asking how should you grow your storage??? I will assume so.


"I haven't read anything good about RAID 5 on these cards, but don't want to rule that out (flashing to IR mode)."
Did you mean flashing to IR or IT mode?

IT mode I believe is the mode where you use it as an HBA or plain old SATA port card. My terminology might be wrong though. That is basically what I did with mine. You can find all the info earlier in this thread about how to flash your card. I ran into some trouble because the board I was using - but when I swapped the motherboard for an older one it worked flawless. My advice on flashing is make sure you use an x8 slot and board- older motherboards work great. I used a board that had a video card and no integrated graphics but the older motherboard did not run x8 when an x16 slot video card was installed so I was getting errors. Swapping to a motherboard with no video card and integrated graphics worked well for me. I was lucky to have many machines to try it out.

As far as flashing- I would just tell you go into the earlier pages of this thread and watch my process. It was pretty easy in retrospect. You should be fine. Ask here if you have questions, there is about 5 of us with that card that have it flashed that can help you. I was noob and asked lots of questions I did not need to ask so it's likely the answers are earlier in this thread if you have questions. It's not hard at all.

About your main question- That IBM is a really nice card, especially for that price. I'll assume your going to add more HDD in the future ??? If so then Flexraid and software parity will make more sense IMO. It would give you drive pooling and parity based backup now- (both good) and also allow you to add additional HDD's in the future with very little fuss. Just buy a HDD and add it to the pool. You can add empty or full drives. Does not matter. And you can remove a drive and still read all the data from it. That is a very important feature to me I think many people overlook or downplay - which is a mistake IMO. I really like knowing I can both rebuild a failed drive and not lose data from the parity software RAID system and I also like knowing that if something crazy happened all my data on the drives is readable from any machine.

You don't need Flexraid. But it's not a bad option at all.

If you flash your card to make it just a SATA port multiplier you'll see great performance for software raid. Basically as fast as the HDD reads and writes. Flashing + software raid is a great solution. Your alternative would be running hardware Raid. You can do that with RED drives I believe, or Seagata 3TB. You'd gain some performance in speed but sacrifice some storage (you need more parity backup HDD drives) and you'll be at the mercy of the raid set up. If it breaks down the data is not easily readable in other machines.

I'd order 4 and set up flexraid with 3 as data and 1 as parity. That would be easy set up to start and give you some room to grow.

Adding more drives in future would be easy.

I think your still undecided on hardware versus software raid set up. In that case.. you'll need decide that before deciding on flexraid or another alternative.

Personally the things that are important to me are:

Drive pooling
Parity Back up
Ease of set up / flexibility
Ability to add or subtract from storage pool with both full or empty drives
Data on drives being able to be read from any system.

That's why I choose Flexraid and software raid. Hardware raid has advantages, especially on a more serious set up or enterprise. But for a small home media server I think it's overkill, more expensive, and less flexible.

I'm not sure. I think I skipped that. I didn't want any boot screens slowing down my restarts.

Can you boot into windows ? Is your boot drive on a motherboard SATA port ?

I like the Seagate drives personally. I've had really good luck with them and I own a bunch of them. Very nice performance. Very nice energy profile (especially for a 7200rpm drive). Usually best per TB price too.

Good luck flashing your card.

What is the rest of your system ???

So explain again exactly what the problem is ? You can't boot into windows?

Disable the boot rom. ???? Or option rom ?

Do you have another motherboard you can try ?

You sure it's in the top or first x8/x16 slot ?