Help with Lian Li IB-01B SATA RAID Card and setup of RAID 5

[bsoltan]

Hello all, hopefully this is the right subforum for this.

A few weeks ago I bought the following card: Lian Li IB-01B PCI-Express 5-Port SATA-II & 1-Port e-SATA RAID Controller

Which I teamed up with the Icy Box IB-555SSK backplane, and five 2TB Samsung F4 drives.

The operating system is Windows Server 2008 R2, if you need any further information about the spec I can list that.

I'm trying to get this into a RAID 5 setup however I'm having some problems. (Sorry for the long post but I wanted to cover what I'd done already ).

--

Reading the manual, it states that by setting the jumpers, and holding down the onboard button it should initiate a RAID setup depending on the jumpers. This would've been the simplest way but I couldn't get it to work, or wasn't sure where it should show up.

I then installed the supplied JMicron software which showed all five drives, perfect I thought, so I used the software to setup the RAID array. Great Windows Disk Manager showed a 7.45TB setup.

I decided to test this by creating a small partition of 200MB, which I can't remember what happened, but after a reboot the array had disappeared and the JMicron software was reporting a problem with one of the disks.

So I cleared the array, reset the jumpers on the card and proceeded to start again. However now only 4 of the 5 drives show up both in the JMicron software and in Windows.

I proceeded to uninstall the JMicron software, and then began testing each hard drive. I changed cables and connected them all directly to the motherboard and they all showed. Then I tested a single drive in each slot on the card and they all showed up ok.

So I added all five back onto the card, and now only 4 show up in Windows Disk Manager. I haven't put the JMicron software back on yet, as hopefully I can get it working without that.

--

I'm rather stuck now as to what to do and was hoping someone here might be able to help, at least to get the 5 drives showing (if they should) so I know if it is all working.

Ideal end scenario is to have a working RAID5 array with the minimum of fuss.

Thanks for reading and any help you can provide.

 

[rpstewart]

Personally I'd sling the Lian Li card and get a proper hardware RAID5 card. The Lian Li doesn't provide much more than some extra SATA ports and is actually a performance bottleneck with multi disk arrays.

Something like a second hand Dell Perc card would be a much better bet.

 

[bsoltan]

After looking at all the retailers there were no other cards available that weren't expensive hardware cards that I couldn't justify the price of. This seemed to be the best comprimise, I don't require high performance, just capacity and redundancy.

I'd like to try and get this card working or at least identify if it is faulty as it isn't showing five drives before I replace something I've just bought.

 

[bsoltan]

Bump.

I fiddled around with the help of a friend last weekend and managed to identify the drive that wasn't being read correctly. After testing the drive it appeared it was fully functional.

After leaving the drive to do a complete format, I connected everything back up to the RAID card and then to the backplane and both Windows and the RAID software picked up all five drives.

The RAID software allowed me to create a RAID5, which I did. However it came up with a message saying "cannot detect array please reboot to complete".

So I rebooted and now neither Windows or the RAID software can find anything connected to the RAID card.

I tried updating the driver for the card from the JMicron website but that didn't help.

Now I'm stuck and have to get all my drives to be detected again.

I'm going to try creating an array on the card with only three drives and see if that works.

Any help or advice would be appreciated. At the moment I can't tell if something is faulty or not working correctly, as individual diagnosis on each component seems to indicate they're all ok.