Spec me a RAID1 SATA controller card

MikeHunt79

MikeHunt79

MikeHunt79

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Ok,

I have an old old PC running Windows NT 3.5

It's a pretty critical server, and right now there is no redundancy, meaning of the hard drive fails, I'll have to go to my weekly backup.

Now, I want to go for RAID1 as if one of the hard drives goes down, the system will carry on running...

So, what I need is a SATA controller, which will work with Windows NT. Speed is not important, uptime is.

I plan to use 3 x 320gb 7200.10's for the drives. :)

I also need to boot from the SATA drives. :)
 
Firstly you can't do RAID1 with three drives, it's two or nothing.

RAID1 will be supported by any SATA RAID card so the trick is going to be finding one which has NT 3.5 drivers which is going to be a real challenge seeing as that OS has been out of support for at least 4 years. Looking at the Highpoint site they only have one product which supports NT4 and nothing that does 3.5.

Is this server or workstation? Mirrored dynamic disks might be a better option if you have server.
 
I didn't know RAID1 was for 2 drives only, but that's fine as I haven't ordered the drives yet...

It's running NT server... I'll have a look into Mirrored dynamic disks. This sounds like it could be easier than trying to find a SATA controller with drivers for such an old OS.
 
The nice thing about mirrored dynamic disks is that you can create the mirror without reinstalling. The disadvantage though is they need to be FAT to be of any benefit because the recovery action is to boot from a dos boot disk and edit boot.ini to boot off the second disk.

Big disks will also be a problem for a machine of that sort of age, it's highly unlikely that the BIOS will support 48bit LBA so disks over 132Gb will be a problem.

No option to upgrade the OS?
 
I wish I could upgrade the OS, but at the moment it's acting as a pop3 server, access server and file server. None of it was set up by me, and I have a feeling if I did upgrade the OS, it would screw something up... :(

I may try it by cloning the drive and try an OS upgrade to see if it works, the only problem is I only have access to this machine once a week, so it's become a bit of an ongoing saga.

I do have a NTFS4DOS (and a Windows XP live cd) tho, so I'm guessing I could have NTFS mirrored dynamic disks as I can still edit boot.ini despite the filesystem being NTFS...

I totally forgot about the 132gb limit tho, I may go with 80Gb drives then as there's no point in using 320gb drives if I can only use less than half to the drive, and I refuse to use DDO software as I've found it flakey at best. I don't really need lots of storage space, it just needs to be reliable. :)
 
is this in a work place? could you not buy a new box, install OS on that then move the current boxes roles over onto the new box bit by bit?
 
mrbios said:
is this in a work place? could you not buy a new box, install OS on that then move the current boxes roles over onto the new box bit by bit?
Click to expand...
Yep it is in a workplace, and the only time the machine isn't being used is on a Friday afternoon, so that's the only real time I've got to tinker with it...

I could try the new box and OS approach, and doing things like sharing the folders and pop3 server isn't a problem, but t I haven't a clue how all of the MS access stuff is set up. It's working right now, and tbh even tho it's an old rig, it copes fine. All I really need want is to have some hard drive redundancy as if the server goes down, the business pretty much grinds to a halt. :eek:

I'm gonna give the mirrored dynamic disks a go... It sounds like it will work well once it's set up. :)
 
There may be another way....

The XFX revo PCI card is available for little money. It should be seen by the system as a standard ATA drive controller and boasts that it needs no software support.

There is software with it that allows you to monitor it from the OS but I don't think you need it to run.

The card supports 3 SATA ports through SATA to IDE bridge and can do raid 1, 0 or 3

All configured from it's own BIOS and is a hardware solution so will have no impact on the server resources.

With NT 3.5 I doubt you'd be able to do an uptime rebuild but at least it would keep going until Friday afternoon's

AD

PS ... I think Netcell, the chipmaker has gone bust so you might want to get a spare in case of card failure
 
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they cost about £10 or less online mate, cracking cards

i've got the 5port one, looking for a 2nd incase mine messes up!
 
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