Exin

Yeah, this is not a general raid forum, i know. But it's the only good Raid forum AT ALL. Also, i wasn't able to boot on the other system whatsoever. I exactly tried that. I only need to back up like 50-100GB. But like i said, the other Nvidia board, a completely different system detects the Array, but i can'T access it. Looks like i have to get a similar Board then.

Hello! I would like to give that Raid array from a Nforce 3600 Pro based board one more chance after the board died just recently. But the Array makes some troubles being found correctly on other Nforce based boards. I tried it with an old Asus board with Nforce 4, the array was detected healthy and everything is fine. The windows 7 on it boots somewhat...as much as a Windows 7 would boot on another completely different platform. But when i install Windows XP on that machine on another HDD, even with newest drivers, Windows does not find the array and displays the HDD's as single unrecogizable ones instead. Same goes if i want to install Win7 on that board on the array. Orfcourse i tried to use drivers on install (which i didn't even need previously) But it only shows me one HDD and doesn't let me install on it. The stripe consists of 3 Seagate 250GB Harddisks. How good are chances that i have more luck with a board with the same chipset? -Exin

You mean pci express? Because that's a PCIe card.

What you don't understand is, PCI is ONE BUS. ALL the devices that are on PCI have to share the same 133MB/s bandwidth. The only machines with real independent PCI(-X) slots was some SUN server...

It also depends on if your Controller card supports PCIe 2.0. Many of them simply don't. BUT, i had the same idea, adding drives to the PCIe 1x port. From my expierience gigabit ethernet is ok on a PCI slot. Also, i cannot believe that your onboard Network is only 100mbit. I even have a old P4(well, had), that had gigabit onboard and my old Powermac G4 with only 533Mhz has Gigabit ethernet aswell..

The problem is, there are barely any standard PCI cards that use the 66mhz "extra feature" of PCI-X slots, or in standard PCI slots. But you also have to remember that alot of devices can be connected to the PCI slots. I'm not sure how new your board is, but it can be possible that the Audio codec, IDE & Floppy, Serial & Parallel ports are all connected to the one PCI Bus. Maybe also Ethernet. So if you have PCI Gigabit Ethernet and a capable harddisk on a SATA PCI controller, they have to share the 133MB/s bandwidth already when transferring data over the network. I use this only with slow or not so important harddisks...

Yeah, i just pointed out the uselessness of the "upgrade" Macs got suddenly. I might just try to get the data off the hardware raid and buy a pci-express sata card.

Yeah, i thought about software raid ever since i found out that it's a feature back in Mac OS X. But i really doubt that i will find a cheap PCI-X card for the mac, so mac os-x is out of the question, except if if ever get a Hackintosh system to work. Only diappointment on that side. Also, BREAKING NEWS. The Mainboard's PCI-Bridge seems to be damaged. The machine doesn't find ANY PCI Card anymore, doesn't find the onboard Ethernet and hardly works with USB and has problems booting from the onboard SATA. I will try to get a new board soon. Then i can think of backing up the data from the hardware raid and think of a better solution.

Thanks. Now i have to get another board. Because alternative controllers in that formfactor are quite a bit too expensive for me.

dandirk: Oh, i'm just posting here, because this seems to be the only really good forum about all kinds of NAS-related topics. I would like to use unraid. But the lack of Firmware-based disk access vs. driver based access in "older" controllers make it quite difficult in that case to find a proper controller if unraid doesn't have the proper driver... I'll wait until i switch to a PCI-Express based system. C3: Thanks, I would really like to know that "wiggle room". Like if the Megaraid Sata 300-8x would be a possible upgrade. The thing here is not the Hardware raid itself, but a fast PCi-x sata controller. But most of them do not support standard harddisk-profiles. You have to put them in arrays and so on...which already cost me all the filetables when adding a drive to such a controller... But it seems that controller was popular enough to get another one...

My LSI Megaraid 150-6 finally gave up while running. I guess it was the heat. Bios screen still pops up, but the Webios message does not appear and the system halts after "detecting" the drives. The controller is neither reachable through the Firmware upgrade, nor does Windows boot correctly even with the bios disabled. I think about a few options listed here: http://www.ebay.de/itm/LSI-3ware-9500S-4LP-4-port-SATA-RAID-0-1-10-5-JBOD-PCI-Arrays-2TB-/170781735833?pt=Controller&hash=item27c3627b99#ht_2398wt_1054 http://www.ebay.de/itm/AMCC-3Ware-9550SX-8LP-SATA-II-Raid-Controller-4-Sata-Kabel-/150819520811?pt=Controller&hash=item231d8b412b#ht_660wt_934 http://www.ebay.de/itm/BROADCOM-BC4452-SATA-Controller-4port-133MHz-PCI-X-/150817081968?pt=Controller&hash=item231d660a70#ht_4160wt_980 Anything above 50€ is financial out of the question at the moment... Are LSI-generated Raids compatible with 3Ware controllers? Has anyone ever made any expierience with these PCI-X controllers?

Can ny user of HP Controllers tell me which board and cpu he uses?

I tried the controller now in my Tyan Mainboard. (S2927-E) And it works fine. But in the DFI Lanparty (Also AMD, Socket AM3) it shows the described behavior. Am i missing something?

Maybe i should explain what's happening here. in my system, a PC, the BIOS Screen comes up, but after memory test, the controller shows up it's initializing. It displays a small animation while the disks spin up and then a cursor blinks where the animation was. No ORCA Setup message, no controller config splash screen like in the HP server. Also, the machine won't boot at all, from no device. The Init screen just stays there. I also can't get into the BIOS setup. If i press anything, the Init screen just appears earlier. I also tried using the card in another slot. It eports the other slot in the init screen, but everything else stays the same. Also, if i connect no Harddrives..... I will try it in the Tyan Dual Socket F system now.

Hello! I would like to know if it's possible to flash this controller to a different firmware to make it work in a other system than a HP Proliant server.... It's relatively cheap right now because many companies throw their old servers away which contain this card. I think it's not a bad one, considering the 512MB Cache memory and the good overall design. the Chipset is a LSI SAS 1078 C1, but the firmware only spins up the drives, initializes them, but then.... nothing.... In a different machine than a HP server ocourse. In a HP server, the ORCA Setup message prompt appears, which doesn't here. At least over here, you can get this card between 50-100€. It got 8 physical SAS/SATA ports. It would be a shame to let it rot. Since i'm not going to use the server. (Too slow, too much power consumption, no PCI-Express power possibility.) Any help on this would be nice.