Hardware RAID questions

[tomaatvk]

Yesterday I orderd the Mushkin scorpion deluxe 480GB for a pretty low price (why I bought it) and I know it needs an LSI configuration utility to work but as this is the first time I'm going with some RAID card (it's a RAID card with 4 internal 120GB SSD's) I still have some questions about the LSI configuration utility.

 

When the card starts running it needs to create and load a custom ROM to make the system see it as 1 drive, but does it need to recreate and reload it every time I restart my pc or is that just the first time?

 

The utility (if it needs to go through it every boot-up) will slow the boot-up process down. Could I maybe do something to make it run the utility in the background so the boot doesn't get slowed down so much by, for example, installing windows on another SSD (non-RAID) so it can load windows on that drive and run the utility on the RAID card at the same time costing me no extra boot time?

 

Thanks for your help or suggestions.

[Zimon]

Well.. i do not have experience with that piece of hardware, but if it´s anything like a "normal" (server grade) raid controller from LSI than it should be somewhat like this:

 

If you boot your system up, the raid controller initialisation is part of the POST-Process, you can not do anything to accelerate this.

During the initialisation of the card you can press CTRL+H to enter the raid-cards bios, where you can set up your raid configuration and stuff.

To manage the raidcard in windows, you´ll need the LSI storage Manager.

 

Further information here: https://www.thomas-krenn.com/en/wiki/Managing_an_MegaRAID_Controller

 

But as i said, this is basically for server grade raid controllers... That mushkin thing may have it´s own way of doing things...

[tomaatvk]

-snip-

 

There is little to none info on this subject to be found easilly. I found one youtube video of someone booting the machine and it did go through what seemed like a standard LSI configuration utility (searched for some other RAID card boot-ups to compare). So I guess it should be about the same utility as server grade RAID cards with less posibilities.

 

Thanks for enlightning me on some stuff.

[leadeater]

Well.. i do not have experience with that piece of hardware, but if it´s anything like a "normal" (server grade) raid controller from LSI than it should be somewhat like this:

 

If you boot your system up, the raid controller initialisation is part of the POST-Process, you can not do anything to accelerate this.

During the initialisation of the card you can press CTRL+H to enter the raid-cards bios, where you can set up your raid configuration and stuff.

To manage the raidcard in windows, you´ll need the LSI storage Manager.

 

Further information here: https://www.thomas-krenn.com/en/wiki/Managing_an_MegaRAID_Controller

 

But as i said, this is basically for server grade raid controllers... That mushkin thing may have it´s own way of doing things...

 

Pretty much the same from the reviews and screen shots of it booting up that I've seen. It's not going to add too much to the boot times but it will have to initilize the LSI firmware, detect the SSDs and the RAID configuration on every boot.