'Promise' On board RAID controllers

[bengal_lancer]

I've just put together a high spec system based on the Gigabyte GA-8INXP mobo which has an on board Promise IDE RAID chip 20276. I'm trying to config the 3 HDDs (80GB each) thus:-

One for the OS (XP Pro)
2 data disks in RAID 1 config for security of my data etc. The 2 HDDs for RAID plug into their own dedicated RAID sockets on the Mobo, the RAID controller having its own BIOS and drivers etc. Both HDDs are set to Master as required.

The HDD with the OS (which I have partitioned into 2 roughly equal 40GB drives) is attached to IDE 1 primary channnel socket.

All seemed to go ok on setup, the Promise BIOS was entered and the RAID 1 array was set up (only RAID 1 and 0 possible with this BIOS) and verified functional at BIOS level. At full boot up entering XP control panel disk management revealed that all 3 drives are recognised/ active but to RAID array is not detected by windows.

Now here is the good bit..... apparently the 20276 chipset is exactly the same as the chipset installed on some of Promise Technology's high end RAID controller cards costing >£250.00. These cards have RAID functions 0,1,5 etc as opposed to the one on the mobo having just 0 & 1, limited by its edition of BIOS lite!
Hence the on board RAID controller on this (and similar) mobos supposedly wont handle more than 2 drives.....

1) Surely it should be possible to get the onboard controller to handle the 2 data disks as designed in either 0 or 1 config and let the OS tie up the array the other drive to make the whole system work as I want?
2) If not any ideas on where to get the 'full' BIOS for this chip releasing the '5' RAID function, enabling the chip to handle the 3rd drive just as it would do if it was mounted in its own card in a PCI slot?

Cheers
B_L

[PPRuNeUser0171]

RAID 5 is not possible with this sort of setup. It's all down to the IDE limitations of two drives per IDE channel.

If you want full RAID 5 then you need SCSI and a 'full-on' RAID card.

RAID 0 is a no-no if you want security.

RAID 1 is possible, I have the same setup here and it's all handled in the BIOS, Remember that you won't see the second drive in Windows because the BIOS is using it as a mirrored drive and so all reading/writing is controlled by the RAID card.

Also, Windows will not recognise the RAID array, It just sees one disk of the two disk set.

If you want to do any RAID management you need to install the software which you should be able to get from the Promise website.

Hope that helps.

Gary.

[bengal_lancer]

Gary,

Thanks for the reply. I have now set up the machine in a RAID 1 config. Security is what I want. Navigating the control panel/admin tools/comp management/disk management reveals that the system does indeed 'see' the HDDs as one (disk 0/ basic).
I have partitioned it 30g/50g NTFS. Right clicking on the disk properties reveals that the systems recognises that is is a mirror array:-

"Promise 1x2 Mirror/RAID1 SCSI Disk Device".
The 2 HDDs (Maxtor 80GB, 8mb buffer) are plugged into the dedicated raid channnels on the mobo, controlled by the on board Promise 20276 chip. The OS is obviously installed on the array and on the face of it I'm ready to go. (At this stage just the raw os is installed. But....

What I really wanted to achieve when I purchased all the parts for the machine, was to put together a system that allowed me to have the OS on its own HDD and use the other 2 in raid 1 purely for data etc. i.e. run the OS HDD in the primary IDE channel and the raid hdds in their dedicated raid channels.

I guess I am asking it to do something it is not designed to do. Certainly Gigabyte state that such a set up has not been tested/ is not supported/ will not work etc.

However... apparently it is possible to make it work either like this or in another manner that DOES involve 3 HDDs. The promise 20276 chip is the same as that on some of their stand alone cards where just this type of set up is possible and my curiosity makes me determined to suss out a way of doing it. A clue may be the Mobos raid BIOS being the Promise MBFastTrak133 'Lite' version. Perhaps flashing on the full version of this (dangerous?) is the key.....?

B_L


BTW I have tried booting up with a 3rd drive (another Max 80gb with XP on it). If I do this and go to disk management the system sees all 3 drives but the array is not recognised as such by windows even though during the boot up the array is quoted as 'functional'.

[PPRuNeUser0171]

I doubt flashing the BIOS would help.

The system BIOS contains all sorts of information for getting the system started, The RAID part of it is just one small section.

Flashing the BIOS with the latest RAID image will probably render your system unbootable!

you should be able to have the O/S on one HDD conencted via a 'normal' IDE channel and then have the data on two drives combinbed as RAID 1 - that will give you redundancy and NTFS will give you security (If it's configured correctly).

What sort of security are you after? There are many levels for PC/Server based systems.
If you are trying to do something specific security-wise then let me know - It's what I do for a living! :D

Gary.

[bengal_lancer]

Thanks for your input and further offer of help. I have visited your website.... very interesting. The basis of my project is this (not very earth shattering):-

For the fun and personal satisfaction of it I decided to lash up my own PC from individually sourced bits. I wanted a high spec machine with an excellent graphics card for gaming, flight sim etc, plenty of storage space for my and my wifes work files, and some built in protection against data loss, hence the raid 1.


With the best will in the world backing up by conventional methods is a pain and with the ever increasing size of HDDs (and dropping cost) I thought that raid 1 would be a good solution... maybe not the best one, but adequate for home/ small business environment. So after much research into the choice of mobo I selected the gigabyte ga8INXP. Amongst other built in features it has on board raid (Promise 20276 chip with MBFastTrak133 'Lite' BIOS for the raid function).

However, the more I think about the more I question why I want the OS on its own HDD separate from the Array. If that HDD goes 'belly-up' badly whilst my data may be secure I may well lose the OS plus the other apps too. This clearly would be a huge headache to sort out especially in a year or so. Maybe a simple pair of drives in RAID 1 is best, partitioned suitably to keep the OS on its own? Should I then put the other apps together with the OS or put them in another partition, and a third one for the data? I'm just guessing as I am out of my depth now!

BTW,
I will also set up a wireless based LAN as follows:-
1x ADSL router -wireless capable. The old desktop PC (a Pent3 based machine), the new machine, my wife's laptop, plus all the usual printer/scanner etc as shared resources. I intend to have an area on the main PC to back up data off the laptop.

Any tips gratefully received!

B_L

[Mac the Knife]

Well, if your house burns down or someone breaks in and pinches your PC then all the RAIDs in the world are not going to help. Or if a powersurge or virus fries the whole lot.

Unless your system is really mission critical and has to be up all the time RAID is a waste of an expensive drive and not physically secure. If you need that sort of security you'd also have an offsite mirror or two.

Why not use the first 80GB drive as your working drive and periodically clone it to the second (I use Pixielabs XXCOPY http://www.xxcopy.com/ which is free for personal use and which can do a quick incremental clone after the first long one), which you store somewhere else (I use a safe in the concrete shed at the far end of the garden). A removable HD drive rack is not expensive and you can set up a weekly reminder that is hard to bypass. That way if your drive or O/S goes Tango Uniform you can just change over and off you go.

It's a minor chore, like most safety, but there's nothing to beat that feeling of being back up and mostly intact in a few minutes.

You can even use VolumeID from http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/utilities.shtml to give both volumes the same volume number so that they will be effectively identical logically as well as physically (the serial numbers won't be the same, but many disks don't have one and I don't know of any software or OS that goes as far as to look for this - http://www.winsim.com/diskid32/diskid32.html).

I also regularly clone My Documents, vital downloads and other essentials to ANOTHER removable drive that lives in another safe at work AND to a separate partion on my kid's XP over the network.

OK, I'm paranoid.....but I'd be interested in what a pro like williamsg says.

[Edited to correct doubledouble postingposting - what was that little PPRuNe hiccup?]

[AngleAndAttack]

Mac,

yes I noticed that Mac.
You did mention cloning.

:O
A&A

[PPRuNeUser0171]

Mac the Knife,

your exactly right about problems with power surges and theft, An offsite backup is a very good idea.

Of course, It all comes down to cost - How much is your data worth?

Imagine losing every single item on the PC, If that gives you cause for concern then look at a decent backup system, A DVD writer can be bought for around £250 (http://www.autdirect.co.uk) and offsite storage can be very cheap - I use my desk drawer at work!

The removable drives are a godsend, I use them all the time as it makes it so easy to remove and swap disks around between PC's. (Again, All my stuff is bought from http://www.autdirect.co.uk - Good Prices).

A safe is a good idea but remeber that they may well be fireproof but they are not heat proof. I remember a scene very well from a few years back - A client's premesis had burnt down and they finally were allowed to dig the safe out of the rubble (It fell through five floors as the floor supports burnt through).
The safe was totally intact, Not a scratch or dent, The key was produced and the safe opened to reveal the lovely site of 100+ backup tapes and CD's turned into one huge molten mess - The safe had acted like an oven a cooked the media inside it.

Another client got lucky when they tried to restore a single file and found that every single tape they had was blank.... In two years they had never done a test restore.
As soon as they realised they made bloody sure that the backup job was modified to backup the data!

Good thing too as two weeks later the mail server died......

Gary.

[bengal_lancer]

As ever and typical for a Pprune thread it has already gone off topic. Thanks MTK I'm well aware of the shortcomings of just raid. However if my house burns down I will have much greater concerns than the data on the computer.

Now back to the main topic which is a hardware/ system related issue. What I am trying to work out/ get some help on is:-

Is it possible to get the system running with 3 hdds, 2 as a raid array and the 3rd as the main boot disk/ OS platform- not part of the array. Irrespective of whether it is a good idea or not I am curious to try it out. Thus far the best I have done is got the array up and running on its own (OS embedded in the array), no other hdds connected;

OR, 3rd HDD in the primary IDE socket with OS and RAID array still connected - like this the system 'sees' all three drives

HDD in primary IDE - C:
RAID pair in raid controller sockets - F: & G: (not recognised as an array even though at boot up the screen flashes up a message that the Mirror array is functional).

[Mac the Knife]

Oh dear bengal - just trying to help. You did say that you wanted RAID "..for data security, etc." and since you were having a problemette I was just suggesting that there might be other approaches.

I found this http://www.hardwaretech.info/tutorials/raid_setup.php via Google but you've probably already seen it.

[PPRuNeUser0171]

Bengal,

Yes.

Setup two IDE disks comming off the same ribbon cable, These will be the RAID array.

have another disk coming off the OTHER IDE channel, This will be the O/S.

If I know the Mobo you are talking about there SHOULD be another set of IDE channels that are non-RAID, Check the mobo manual or makers website.

That will do it.

As for the thread going off topic - It happens!

Gary.

[Background Noise]

Thanks for the xxcopy link - just what I was looking for.

I've just tried to set up a mirror array on a gigabyte mb with the same promise controller and failed. Failed initially using the existing disk (think I mirrored the new disc onto the old one!) then reinstalled XP onto the 2 fresh drives - once I'd figured out how to load the raid drivers as there was not a floppy with the mb. The array worked, as in both drives had identical data, but XP was very slow and crashed frequently and eventually terminally. So I've gone back to a single drive with the other being for an identical backup.

Incidentally, the promise book says to have a separate lead for each of the mirror disks.

[bengal_lancer]

Indeed, the Promise handbook with the giga mobo is very specific about one cable per drive, based on the use of the dedicated sockets for the Promise 20276 chip (coded green on this ver colourful board!). Both HDDs must have pin jumpers set to master.

B_L

[Mac the Knife]

Did you ever get it working Bengal? And if so, how? Just curious.

A wee troll around Google wound seen to indicate that you aren't the only person to have had problems. RAID 0 seems to have been horribly slow for many people until Promise brought out a patch that partially fixed it. Couldn't find many reports of RAID 1.