New fileserver.....

[Evildead666]

Piccies....VERY VERY BIG (first try at image hosting)

RAID Card and Box


A look at the box with long exposure in the darkness....


Inside the box.


The fan that I finally didn't use since the RAID card is only just holding inside the case...

[Evildead666]

I have more pictures of the actual case, but they are on another camera....

[Evildead666]

Other, Smaller, piccies

All pictures are 1280x960, will try the 1024x768/576 option next pics. 220K only tho...
Hard disk


The Mobo.


rear of mobo


case innards before installation. It came with all internal cables already routed.


I might have missed a couple, and will try to get some less blurry pics of the inside and out, with better lighting.

[Evildead666]

The first few pictures were taken with my old Fuji 4900z 2.3MP camera, and the sharp looking ones with a Canon Ixus 450 4.5MP....The Fuji's lens needs cleaning inside....

[Evildead666]

The 2.5in HDD in the case....


One thing to note is that the case came without any instructions at all. A lot of accessories tho.

640x480 this one
one of the memory DIMMs

[Evildead666]

So, just got back from work, and the Disks have finally finished initializing the RAID.
In Win 2K3 server, disk management, ooh, new disk detected, that needs to have the MBR written to it, and it automaticall splits the volume into a first 2048GB, the 700GB in a second.
I can create a partition on the first 2048GB part, but not on the second 700GB part, its greyed out...

Is there a disk size limit in Win 2K3 server...?

[Evildead666]

[Evildead666]

For once that was quick...
The MBR has a limit of 2TB
Convert the disk to GPT and hey presto.

only took a bit of googling, and it was on a MS forum about WHS and the fact that RAID is not supported...good info anyways....
Now I know.

After 40hours+ of initialization, I was feeling a bit flummoxed....formatting under way....that'll take another day probably.....

[Evildead666]

Formatting is going quite fast thankfully.

The Raid 5 stripe is set to 16K automatically, not changeable.
I set the cluster size to 16K also when formatting.
Was this wise ? It seemed logical.

[Evildead666]

Some disk tests with HDTach 3....

The 2.5in Hitachi 120Gb 5400rpm sata drive running the OS:


The 4 Disk Raid5 setup onthe Promise controller, PCI bus :


And the two compared to each other:


Just for fun, the WD Raptor 10krpm 150Gb SATA :


And the Seagate 1Tb 7200rpm SATA :


Not too bad....

[Evildead666]

I'd been having problems installing the video driver.
Every time I installed the driver, the only display option was 640x480 in 4bit.
Catalyst control center wouldn't start either.
I fully updated windows, and still had the same problem. No matter what driver I installed.
So i decided to flash the bios.
Got the floppy drive and floppies booted up, then saw there is no floppy connector.
Used Winflash, even tho its probably the least safe method to update the bios, and it worked.
As soon as i booted back into Windows, I have hardware acceleration of all 3d and video.
It just seems the audio over hdmi driver isn't being installed, but i have that somewhere from the 4870 installation on my main pc...

So its finally all together, and running as hoped.
Its gonna take a few days to transfer, since most of the disks have to be plugged into a USB drive adaptor on my main pc....but at least it will be safer than keeping it on single disks with no redundancy

[Evildead666]

Well, the RAID failed yesterday, during the day.
Not sure quite what happened, since there are no logs for any of it anywhere....
it seems the controller went from 4 disk raid to 3+1, and instead of 2.7TB i only had 2.2TB available (2TB formatted).

I hadn't deleted any of the stuff I had put on it yet, even tho I was up to 1.7TB in used space.....

Have now recreated the Raid 5 and am trying again...
I flashed the Mobo with the raid card installed, and the RAID5 was created before the flash.
The web interface for the creation of the raid is different from the one I had initially, so this time might be the good one....
Have also set stripe to 16K (default, unchangeable) and the cluster size to 4K clusters this time...

We'll see how it goes....

[Evildead666]

Well it hasn't failed again (yet). Will keep an eye on it.

Have upgraded it to 2x2Gb DDR2 since it was so cheap, 50Euros, Corsair Value ram.
The fanmate is installed on the inlet fan thank god. I will be sleeping better from now on.
The rear radial fan was installed too, just to get a flow of air thru the case. It just fits.

Might get some pics done, since the front lights don't work anymore, and I have to find out why...

[Evildead666]

I must be blessed....

The Promise software kept on telling me I only had 2.2TB of space, whereas Windows still gave me the whole 2.76TB.
One CHKDSK later and 320GB of space is used on the drive, but is not actually on the disk as a file or files....I basically lost 320GB of free space after the CHKDSK.

Now, I wake up this morning to see that the display is funny (like it was on the wrong refresh rate) and it won't boot or display anything, it seems to immediately lock up...

I checked the Promise disk compatibility list and the 1TB EACS is on there (16Mb cache) and the EADS is not (32Mb cache)...

The promise driver is the latest one, and the BIOS is also the latest one...

The only things I did to this box in the last week were yesterday : put the power and HDD LED's the right way round so they work...and updated the video driver to 9.4...(probably the culprit)...

Quite lucky i'm not working today....but this IS starting to piss me off a little....

[Evildead666]

Its booting again at least, and doing yet another interminable chkdsk...

I might go for this instead, since the promise controller has bad news with 1Tb drives and generally bad with 4 disks in RAID5 from what i've googled...

http://www.highpoint-tech.com/USA/rr1740.htm

This might be a better solution....