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lchapman99
4 Posts
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March 8th, 2005 23:00
Turn off RAID on 670?
I have a Precision 670 configured with two seperate hard drives, no RAID. When I
browse the Bios (and watch boots) the RAID functionality is "on". I found
the setting in the bios that allows me to turn RAID off.
Pros? Cons?
-- Larry Chapman
Since no raid configurations are being managed by the SATA, and the SATA dives listed in SATA 1 and SATA2 in Bios independent you can turn off the SATA raid controller in the Bios and the drives will works as regular drives.
I have two SATA in my 670 with raid off; working as regular drives, and my Raid setup is with an external SCSI array.
lchapman99
4 Posts
533
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Posted March 9th, 2005 13:00
I wasn't asking for the pros and cons of RAID. But I agree with your synopsis. :-)My system has two SATA drives (not identical) that have no RAID configured at all. However, they are being managed by the RAID in the Bios. I'm having serious issues with "delayed write failures" that mention in the dump "aarich.sys" (the RAID driver).So, on the 670 Precision Workstation - can I turn off the RAID functionality and still use the SATA drives?-- LSC
lchapman99
4 Posts
533
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Posted March 9th, 2005 13:00
Ok, I just went into the Bios and turned the RAID off. On reboot, the Windows XP screen (moving blue dots) appears for a moment, then the system reboots. I tried the reboot twice. Same behavior. I went back into the Bios and turned the RAID back on and now XP comes up fine. No messages in the event viewer.
-- Larry Chapman
The problems is that when your original Windows XP was installed the SATA raid was active and therefore the SATA Raid device driver is installed in windows device manager and is controlling the behavior of the drives as being Raid even thought they are not setup as Raid. Windows is treating both drives as raid drives.
When you go to device manager is the SATA RAID controller shows up under the “SCSI and RAID Controller” Tab?
Also do the individual SATA drives have the actual drives description under the “Disk Drives” Tab? Or do the show up as two entries indicating they are configured as SATA RAID drives? Or do the drives shows up as the individual SATA disks you have install with the Manufacturers name Seagate/WD/Maxtor?
It is going to be difficult to disable Raid and allow Windows to Boot to the primary drive due to the original setup, since the physical drive probably have the SATA raid driver as opposed to the regular SATA disk drivers.
The only two ways I know to correct the problem is to disable the Sata Raid, and use the original Windows Install disk and during boot up use the Windows Disk to install the operating system again, but instead of installing if Windows is able to find the application already installed in the sata drive it will ask to if you want to do a repair, instead of a clean install.
The repair will remove the sata raid configuration and install the proper disk drives for the sata drives.
If the Windows install is unable to find an existing Windows installation then you will need to do a clean install of Windows without the Raid setup. Make sure you backup critical data files before you proceed with any of the two options.
Chipstone
525 Posts
533
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Posted March 9th, 2005 12:00
Raids setups are designed to combined the aggregate capacity of multiple drive as one large disk (array), when combining multiple drives as one entity as in RAID 0 the speed of read/write on the Raid disk can be substantial sometime two to three time the speed when compared to a single disk. However since the data is spread over the span of the number of disk used on Raid 0, if the raid should fail for any reason you will loose all your data: Raid 0 Benefit: Sheer Speed. Cons: No data protection.
If however you set a mirror raid setup, where 4 disk are selected for a Raid 1 then the raid will use two of the disk to process the information and two of the disk will be use to simultaneously maintain and have a copy of the data being stored on the active disk. This setup hover will show only the aggregate capacity of two disks, since they are being used by the Raid setup as a mirror backup for data; in essence you loose the capacity of two disks for the sake of a redundant backup storage. This setup is not high in performance but rather high in data integrity. Raid 1: Benefit: Data protection. Cons: Loss In Performance.