I am having continuing problems with this RAID controller in Windows 2003 Server Standard. It has four 200gb Western Digital drives connected and a 256MB Dimm. I had purchased it with the intention of running RAID 5 with 3 drives and the last drive as a hot spare. I later discovered that only RAID 0 can be set to use a hot spare in the software for the RAID controller - not happy.
After being in use for a short while I lost 2 drives at the same time and luckily managed to delete and recreate the array without the loss of too much data; I had backups and used some file recovery tools. Due to my experience with RAID 5 (and my discovery at this time that the hot spare doesnt work for this leve of RAID) I decided to convert the controller to running two RAID 1 arrays, each array making a compressed backup to the other. Therefore a reduced chance of dataloss.
I came to the computer this morning and discovered that the TWO of the hard drives (not the same two as before) and been dropped from the arrays; one from each. I tried to rebuild, but the system froze and at this moment in time will not boot into Windows; I remain confident that my dat is safe for the meantime, fingers-crossed.
The system is based around a S478 mATX Gigabyte motherboard with a Pentium 4 - Prescott 3GHz chip and 1 gig of RAM (PC2700 running on a divider). I am using onboard graphics and a RAID 3 card for my boot drive array. I had also been having issues with the DLink Gigabyte NIC I had purchased (which does have official Windows 2003 drivers). A lot of the problems originated from its installation. It is still in the system, but not in use; reverted back to the onboard 10/100 LAN. The PSU is a 480W Tagan, more than able to power a system with 7 hard drives, one optical drive and the other hardware stated above.
What do you think the problem could be? Possibly bad RAM? Bad card? Software? Incompatability? Please help it is driving me mad!
After being in use for a short while I lost 2 drives at the same time and luckily managed to delete and recreate the array without the loss of too much data; I had backups and used some file recovery tools. Due to my experience with RAID 5 (and my discovery at this time that the hot spare doesnt work for this leve of RAID) I decided to convert the controller to running two RAID 1 arrays, each array making a compressed backup to the other. Therefore a reduced chance of dataloss.
I came to the computer this morning and discovered that the TWO of the hard drives (not the same two as before) and been dropped from the arrays; one from each. I tried to rebuild, but the system froze and at this moment in time will not boot into Windows; I remain confident that my dat is safe for the meantime, fingers-crossed.
The system is based around a S478 mATX Gigabyte motherboard with a Pentium 4 - Prescott 3GHz chip and 1 gig of RAM (PC2700 running on a divider). I am using onboard graphics and a RAID 3 card for my boot drive array. I had also been having issues with the DLink Gigabyte NIC I had purchased (which does have official Windows 2003 drivers). A lot of the problems originated from its installation. It is still in the system, but not in use; reverted back to the onboard 10/100 LAN. The PSU is a 480W Tagan, more than able to power a system with 7 hard drives, one optical drive and the other hardware stated above.
What do you think the problem could be? Possibly bad RAM? Bad card? Software? Incompatability? Please help it is driving me mad!