XPS9000 & RAID

Going nutz here, turning to the real deal here for advice/help.

Have had an XPS9000 since 12/31/09, came with a 640GB HDD, 12GB memory,
i7-975 Extreme Edition processor, Blu-Ray ROM/DVD burner, etc. Decided
Fri, 04/09, to implement RAID as an upgrade (I have 2 identical Seagate
7200.12 HDDs for it). Problem is the JMicron RAID drivers (whether
Dell's or JMicron's), I cannot get them to install/work. I run the
driver install and everything seems to have run okay, but when I run the
JMicron utility it tells me there's an error, RAID device not found.
Setting up/breaking an array in the BIOS (which is set to RAID, BTW)
makes no difference at all. I created the driver floppy as described by
copying the 4 files from the \floppy64 folder to the root of a FDD. When
I tell Win7 Setup I have mfg files, it will look at the FDD. The screen
has a checkbox to exclude drivers which are incompatible with my
hardware, when it's checked, nothing comes up. If I uncheck it, it lists
the same thing 11 times (JMB36x RAID drivers (or words to that effect);
but doesn't like it.

Intel's MSM (Matrix Storage Mgr) is a similar deal, i.e., copy files to
a FDD and tell Win7 Setup. This seems to go properly, I can define/break
an array, define the array as a simple disk in Win7's Comp Mgmt, etc.

I don't want to bet on the wrong thing here and lose 100's of GBs of
video, so I'm asking here for advice/help/whatever you've got here.

TIA,
Tony H

Hi!

I don't want to bet on the wrong thing here and lose 100's of GBs
of video, so I'm asking here for advice/help/whatever you've got
here.

I think that you'd better make a backup before doing anything.
Tinkering with RAID settings can be a data destructive process. You
should expect the worst when "fakeraid" is in use.

I looked at the specifications for the (Studio) XPS 9000 and it seems
to use the Intel ICH10/ICH10R southbridge. This southbridge provides
for at least six serial ATA ports. After looking at the Dell service
manual and its drawings of the motherboard, I can only conclude that
there is no need for any additional serial ATA controller such as the
JMicron part.

I'd suggest looking at the motherboard to see whether or not such a
part is there to start with.

William

JMicron controls the eSATA port on the 9000.

"William R. Walsh" wrote in message
...
Hi!

I don't want to bet on the wrong thing here and lose 100's of GBs
of video, so I'm asking here for advice/help/whatever you've got
here.

I think that you'd better make a backup before doing anything.
Tinkering with RAID settings can be a data destructive process. You
should expect the worst when "fakeraid" is in use.

I looked at the specifications for the (Studio) XPS 9000 and it seems
to use the Intel ICH10/ICH10R southbridge. This southbridge provides
for at least six serial ATA ports. After looking at the Dell service
manual and its drawings of the motherboard, I can only conclude that
there is no need for any additional serial ATA controller such as the
JMicron part.

I'd suggest looking at the motherboard to see whether or not such a
part is there to start with.

William

On 04/13/10 18:47, WSZsr wrote:
JMicron controls the eSATA port on the 9000.

"William R. Walsh" wrote in message
...
Hi!

I don't want to bet on the wrong thing here and lose 100's of GBs
of video, so I'm asking here for advice/help/whatever you've got
here.

I think that you'd better make a backup before doing anything.
Tinkering with RAID settings can be a data destructive process. You
should expect the worst when "fakeraid" is in use.

I looked at the specifications for the (Studio) XPS 9000 and it seems
to use the Intel ICH10/ICH10R southbridge. This southbridge provides
for at least six serial ATA ports. After looking at the Dell service
manual and its drawings of the motherboard, I can only conclude that
there is no need for any additional serial ATA controller such as the
JMicron part.

I'd suggest looking at the motherboard to see whether or not such a
part is there to start with.

William

Thanks to you both for replying. Interesting point JMicron & the
eSATA port. System seems to run fine without the drivers supplied by
Dell (so I guess Win7 includes what's required). The RAID0 array I
defined was via Intel's MSM (the 2 TB Seagate 7200.12 HDDs). I know I
have the ICH10R in my X58 chipset (yet no chipset driversshrug), with
the 6 ports, so this sounds right to me. HDTune says they average 181.5
MB/sec and peak at 214.4MB/sec. That's a lotta bytes!

With the disk, memory & i7-975 processor I'm trying to build a monster
for video capture, editing & rendering; however, I don't want to commit
to this RAID setup until I feel comfortable with it. I've moved 100GB
of video to it so far, but haven't tried to capture yet.

Once again, thanks to you both, I'm feeling more comfortable with this
setup.

On 04/13/10 14:00, William R. Walsh wrote:
Hi!

I don't want to bet on the wrong thing here and lose 100's of GBs
of video, so I'm asking here for advice/help/whatever you've got
here.

I think that you'd better make a backup before doing anything.
Tinkering with RAID settings can be a data destructive process.

"Can"?

You should expect the worst when "fakeraid" is in use.

Good advice - backup's long since done. I tinkered with RAID about 3 yrs
ago with my XPS720 & XPS410 - dumped them both because I encountered
stability problems - a real no-no!

Should I be looking at a "real" RAID controller, i.e., a card, if I'm
serious?

On 4/14/2010 12:51 AM, Tony Harding wrote:
On 04/13/10 14:00, William R. Walsh wrote:
Hi!

I don't want to bet on the wrong thing here and lose 100's of GBs
of video, so I'm asking here for advice/help/whatever you've got
here.

I think that you'd better make a backup before doing anything.
Tinkering with RAID settings can be a data destructive process.

"Can"?

You should expect the worst when "fakeraid" is in use.

Good advice - backup's long since done. I tinkered with RAID about 3 yrs
ago with my XPS720 & XPS410 - dumped them both because I encountered
stability problems - a real no-no!

Should I be looking at a "real" RAID controller, i.e., a card, if I'm
serious?

RAID on the motherboard has gotten lots better, at least with an
Intel-designed or -branded board. A couple of years ago, I did NOT
assemble a RAID system for a customer who required near 24/7 access for
stock trading. Recently, I DID do a RAID-1 system with an Intel DP55WB
motherboard for a local graphic artist. System went together
beautifully, RAID setup was simple, and the system runs and runs and
runs 64-bit Win 7.

If I had to make the transition from non-RAID to RAID-1, I would back up
all data, then reinstall Windows from scratch... Ben Myers

Hi!

"Can"? *

I've heard that the Intel Matrix Storage manager tool tries not to
destroy data if it doesn't have to. Seemingly some operations are
supposed to be non-destructive.

Good advice - backup's long since done.

I was worried, since you mentioned something about not wanting to lose
video data. Extra disks are cheap -- I bought a Western Digital Green
Power 2TB drive for about $140 shipped from Newegg yesterday. It's
going to be in a FreeNAS box in another house. As the two places are
within wireless network distance, I'm going to do a regular rsync from
one FreeNAS to the other.

Ever since a basement flood in 2004, I've been beating the drum about
making better backups, with offsite capability, especially since all
of my DDS tapes went under. I now have regular running backups on one
FreeNAS box (made from an old HP Vectra Pentium Pro--probably the only
PPro in the world with a SATA card in it!). Every month these get
dumped off to an external disk that goes to a safety deposit box.

Should I be looking at a "real" RAID controller, i.e., a card, if
I'm serious?

While many fakeraid solutions have improved (especially the Intel
ones) I just don't trust 'em. One problem in particular stems from
having the disk controller itself fail. Real RAID controllers deal
with this by letting you back up the configuration to a file, which
can later be restored to another controller board.

So, yes, I'd definitely consider looking into a real hardware RAID
controller. For basic arrays, I've used Adaptec's 3405 adapter and
been very happy with it. It is a real hardware RAID controller with
support for four SATA disks and many different RAID modes, including
0, 1, 5 and JBOD. The only drawback is that's not cheap.

I also used to use the Adaptec 2410SA, and one is still under my
control, running a RAID-5 array with a hot spare drive in a security
camera recorder made from a PC. In the time that it's been up, two of
the four disks have failed (each one at different times). Every time
it has done just what it should--killed off the offending disk,
switched to the hot spare and started rebuilding itself...even while
16 cameras worth of video were still pouring into the array.

Or, if you don't want to do that, look into the software tricks that
Windows can perform with disk based storage. It's possible to run
software RAID on the operating system level with many versions of
Windows. From what I've seen, this works fine and frequently does a
LOT better than any fakeraid solution I've seen.

William

Hi!

JMicron *controls the eSATA port on the 9000.

How interesting. It seems like a wasteful thing to do, and an
unnecessary expense on Dell's part to have that extra controller.
Unless of course they were worried about something zapping the
controller by way of the external port and leaving all of the SATA
ports dead.

However, that does bring to mind another good point...even if the
drivers were installed for the JMicron controller, it won't work to
try and make an array from drives attached to two different
controllers. (It would work if things were done on a higher level,
such as in the operating system, using whatever concept it would have
for software RAID. I still wouldn't want to chance it, though.
Spanning a volume over two controllers sounds like a big risk to me!)

William

On 04/14/10 10:30, William R. Walsh wrote:
Hi!

JMicron controls the eSATA port on the 9000.

How interesting. It seems like a wasteful thing to do, and an
unnecessary expense on Dell's part to have that extra controller.
Unless of course they were worried about something zapping the
controller by way of the external port and leaving all of the SATA
ports dead.

However, that does bring to mind another good point...even if the
drivers were installed for the JMicron controller, it won't work to
try and make an array from drives attached to two different
controllers. (It would work if things were done on a higher level,
such as in the operating system, using whatever concept it would have
for software RAID. I still wouldn't want to chance it, though.
Spanning a volume over two controllers sounds like a big risk to me!)

Agreed, but I wouldn't define an array including an eSATA HDD.