Software or Hardware Raid? Need suggestions

[downloadedskill]

21 hours ago, leadeater said:

It's also good to know that a read error does not mean a disk is failed or even anywhere near failing, read errors can happen for many reasons. A disk will mark the sector as faulty and never use it again, SMART keeps track of this and when the number gets too high this indicates the disk is failing and next time you boot your computer your bios will warn you. For a RAID card it will tell you straight away as it monitors this constantly rather than just at boot or when you run a SMART checking utility. Don't rely too much on SMART though as it can often not pickup a disk about to fail.

Thanks. You guys gave me a bunch of info. I bought a 9260-8i so hopefully I will have better luck with a controller. Does LSI offer any kind of scrubbing? I just read about that, is that kind of what you're referring to?

[scottyseng]

34 minutes ago, downloadedskill said:

Thanks. You guys gave me a bunch of info. I bought a 9260-8i so hopefully I will have better luck with a controller. Does LSI offer any kind of scrubbing? I just read about that, is that kind of what you're referring to?

You did get the on card battery for it right?

 

Err, RAID cards don't do scrubbing per say...they have Consistency checks and patrol reads. They do similar things that involve scanning the array for errors, but it's not exactly scrubbing like in ZFS.

[Captain_WD]

@leadeaterhis name is Cpt Cat Drive :) 

@downloadedskill post back if you need further help with the health of the drives. :)

Regarding the card swap, as the guys pointed out, it would really depend on the card itself. If you manage to get your hands on a card that is the same as the failed one and treats the array the same way (with no differences due to different firmware or different controller on the card) you should be able to get the card to recognize the array and manage to gain access to your data. 

Post back when you do some testing and if you've had success with managing the RAID properly :)

Captain_WD.

[downloadedskill]

Got the card, of course I'm waiting on the SAS-SATA connectors. Oh ebay...you're so inconsistent. Well I put the raid card in, battery began charging and everything looks good. I saw in I believe advance features RAID5 and RAID6 which required an authentication code? I never heard of that before, needing authentication from the manufacturer. Am I just getting stuff confused? Do raid options live elsewhere in the bios of the controller? Cool to know that is a gui bios, didn't expect that.

[scottyseng]

1 hour ago, downloadedskill said:

Got the card, of course I'm waiting on the SAS-SATA connectors. Oh ebay...you're so inconsistent. Well I put the raid card in, battery began charging and everything looks good. I saw in I believe advance features RAID5 and RAID6 which required an authentication code? I never heard of that before, needing authentication from the manufacturer. Am I just getting stuff confused? Do raid options live elsewhere in the bios of the controller? Cool to know that is a gui bios, didn't expect that.

Yeah, I would double check using MegaRAID Storage Manager. RAID5 and RAID6 are considered extra features that require a code to use (Same with Cachecade), however, the 9260-8i should have the codes by default since it ships with them standard. I hope you didn't get a bad card somehow.

 

Yeah, I would get away from the Windows 98 looking LSI MegaRAID card BIOS GUI and use the software Storage Manager instead

[downloadedskill]

On 6/25/2016 at 10:47 PM, scottyseng said:

Yeah, I would double check using MegaRAID Storage Manager. RAID5 and RAID6 are considered extra features that require a code to use (Same with Cachecade), however, the 9260-8i should have the codes by default since it ships with them standard. I hope you didn't get a bad card somehow.

 

Yeah, I would get away from the Windows 98 looking LSI MegaRAID card BIOS GUI and use the software Storage Manager instead

Well that's pretty annoying I bought this to do RAID6. I bought it used so I don't have any kind of codes that shipped with it. Just my luck...

 

 

[scottyseng]

3 hours ago, downloadedskill said:

Well that's pretty annoying I bought this to do RAID6. I bought it used so I don't have any kind of codes that shipped with it. Just my luck...

 

 

Well, they're supposed to be built into the cards though...I think the seller you bought it from took the codes off and ran off with them.

 

Have you gotten MegaRAID Storage Manager installed? You can check the status of the RAID card's codes there. You should see MegaRAID5 and 6 enabled. (You don't have the CV version of the card so you don't have cachevault.

 

Should look like this:

[downloadedskill]

7 hours ago, scottyseng said:

Well, they're supposed to be built into the cards though...I think the seller you bought it from took the codes off and ran off with them.

 

Have you gotten MegaRAID Storage Manager installed? You can check the status of the RAID card's codes there. You should see MegaRAID5 and 6 enabled. (You don't have the CV version of the card so you don't have cachevault.

 

Should look like this:

 

Yea I just got RAID 6 to work it says unlimited just like yours. So that's all good. On the other hand I think my noobness is getting to me again but I didn't know that with a raid controller installed it would render all the rest of my sata ports on my mobo unusable and unbootable. I never knew that was a think. It sucks I was planning on booting from a SSD and using the other ports for backups.

[downloadedskill]

Read a little bit and apparently people with Gigabyte mobos have issues with pcie raid controllers. Something about the pcie slots are only designed for graphics cards. I'm just racking up the points here. Damn.

[leadeater]

2 hours ago, downloadedskill said:

 

Yea I just got RAID 6 to work it says unlimited just like yours. So that's all good. On the other hand I think my noobness is getting to me again but I didn't know that with a raid controller installed it would render all the rest of my sata ports on my mobo unusable and unbootable. I never knew that was a think. It sucks I was planning on booting from a SSD and using the other ports for backups.

No that shouldn't be happening, installing a RAID card is independent from your onboard SATA ports and they will continue to work. You will have to change some bios settings to get it to work properly, setting the primary HDD to the correct one so it boots from the SSD not the RAID card boot volume.

[scottyseng]

2 hours ago, downloadedskill said:

 

Yea I just got RAID 6 to work it says unlimited just like yours. So that's all good. On the other hand I think my noobness is getting to me again but I didn't know that with a raid controller installed it would render all the rest of my sata ports on my mobo unusable and unbootable. I never knew that was a think. It sucks I was planning on booting from a SSD and using the other ports for backups.

Yeah, that shouldn't happen. I had my LSI MegaRAID with two FirePro GPUs in Crossfire (well, with PCIex4 to the LSI controller), but it all still worked with all SATA ports (Though I have a ASUS motherboard). If it is true, wow, that is pretty bad for gigabyte (Though I guess in their view, you aren't supposed to have these RAID cards on consumer motherboards...). You might play with the BIOS settings to see which controls the layout of the lanes. It shouldn't matter what is in your PCIe slots, you should be able to use them all and still have the SATA ports work. Also might to check to see what the BIOS is setting as the primary boot...

[downloadedskill]

9 hours ago, scottyseng said:

Yeah, that shouldn't happen. I had my LSI MegaRAID with two FirePro GPUs in Crossfire (well, with PCIex4 to the LSI controller), but it all still worked with all SATA ports (Though I have a ASUS motherboard). If it is true, wow, that is pretty bad for gigabyte (Though I guess in their view, you aren't supposed to have these RAID cards on consumer motherboards...). You might play with the BIOS settings to see which controls the layout of the lanes. It shouldn't matter what is in your PCIe slots, you should be able to use them all and still have the SATA ports work. Also might to check to see what the BIOS is setting as the primary boot...

Turns out my Molex to sata power adapter might have been bad? Or connection was crap. So looks like they weren't getting power. Was about to boot into ubuntu but everytime w7 starts to load it crashes with bluescreen. Bluescreen is only up for a second. Wanted to try and setup up the array for NTSF in w7 since ubuntu is doing some weird partition into 3 parts when I never asked it to. So I'm trying to figure that whole thing out now.

[scottyseng]

8 hours ago, downloadedskill said:

Turns out my Molex to sata power adapter might have been bad? Or connection was crap. So looks like they weren't getting power. Was about to boot into ubuntu but everytime w7 starts to load it crashes with bluescreen. Bluescreen is only up for a second. Wanted to try and setup up the array for NTSF in w7 since ubuntu is doing some weird partition into 3 parts when I never asked it to. So I'm trying to figure that whole thing out now.

Well, happy to hear it's not the motherboard at least. Hmm, weird, the existing OS shouldn't have gotten corrupted due to you just installing a RAID card (unless somehow it doesn't like the RAID card driver...which it shouldn't crash with). Good luck with the fixing.

[downloadedskill]

1 hour ago, scottyseng said:

Well, happy to hear it's not the motherboard at least. Hmm, weird, the existing OS shouldn't have gotten corrupted due to you just installing a RAID card (unless somehow it doesn't like the RAID card driver...which it shouldn't crash with). Good luck with the fixing.

Thanks. I appreciated all the help!