Onboard and Intel Matrix Storage Manager RAID

[thiggins]

Tried to get back to the Fast NAS series today by trying BIOS level RAID with an Intel ICH9 controller. Got pulled up short very quickly because all I had in the system was SATA drives.

The ASUS P5E-VM D0 BIOS does not allow assigning individual drives as RAID or IDE; it's just all or nothing. So, Strike 1.

I then tried to install IMSM but kept getting "your system doesn't meet requirements" message. Googled a bit and found that for IMSM utility to install, you need to have drives configured as RAID at the BIOS level. Catch-22 and Strike 2.

Finally, another Google finding said that not only do drives need to be set to RAID in the BIOS, but that IMSM requires the system OS to be on the RAID array.

Is all of this correct? Is there a way to use IMSM for a separate RAID volume and have the OS on another drive/volume?

 

[nox]

i'm using matrix raid on one of my machines, but set it up a while ago, it's also on an i975 chipset rather than your G35, so might be slightly different.

What you do is enable it in the BIOS, then next time you boot up you are presented with intels raid manager program. In there I selected the hard drives I wanted to make an array with, now I selected them so believe I could of left one off had I wanted to...

but as an easier answer, that board has 6 sata connectors, and I think the matrix raid only supports up to 4 drives, atleast it does on mine, meaning the other two might be off the jmicron controller. shove your OS disk in one of those sockets, and the ones you want on the array in the ones off the intel controller chip...

give me 5 mins and i'll have checked it's manual for the assignments

Nox

 

[nox]

nope, ignore that, looks like they are all off the intel chip. Should still be able to split them in the raid config bios prog though.

Or just put your OS on an old IDE drive?

Nox

 

[MrFixit]

I have a P965 based board (ASUS P5B Deluxe, ICH7R Intel RAID Chip). I have one SATA drive for boot up and two SATA RAID 1 arrays configured. This all works fine - I can configure the RAID arrays from either the RAID Bios or from Intel Matrix Storage Manager in Windows.

For the OS install (XP) you do need to load the Intel RAID driver (from floppy) even if you are not booting from RAID, if you want to use a RAID array (for data).

In the PC BIOS you do need to assign the SATA drives as RAID but not all drives need to be in an array.

Sorry, I know nothing about IMSM.

 

[thiggins]

Thanks for the info nox and MrF.

I'm trying to do this with XP already installed on one of the SATA drives. The whole thing started when I tried to run the IMSM install while in XP and it told me that the system didn't meet the configuration requirements.

So any tricks to get the Intel RAID drivers installed before I set some of the drives to RAID in the BIOS?

 

[Dennis Wood]

I'm not sure on your desired final configuration...and I haven't used that mobo before. That said, here's how it would typically work on the ICH7 or Nvidia chipsets:

1. Set BIOS function of the SATA controller to RAID, and add the drives you want designated this way. Leave your OS disk out of course.

2. Reboot and go right back into BIOS. Set boot priority to the OS disk you had there in the first place. BIOS should see this drive apart from your RAID designated drives.

3. Access Intel BIOS (CTRL I) (or whatever they're using) and create your RAID array. The option to access this comes right after the motherboard BIOS loads.

4. Initialize and format the RAID array in XP as appropriate. You don't need to load ISM at all, however on our workstations it's needed to set write caching to "on". Wait for awhile until the array initializes.

Hope that helps

 

[thiggins]

Thanks, Dennis. I was trying to have one SATA drive with XP already installed as the boot disk and not part of the RAID array. Then two other SATA drives configured as a RAID 0 array.

Tried the method that you advised, but could not get the SATA drive with XP already on it to be recognized as the boot drive.

Gave up and I'm just about done loading XP on an IDE drive, so that I can get on with my testing. Yeesh! I hate doing Windows installs!

 

[Dennis Wood]

BIOS's can be so counter-intuitive sometimes. Is there an option to disable or enable the RAID array's boot? If this is set to "enabled" (in situations where you don't want to) I've seen issues regardless of the boot order.

If you're doing a fair bit of this, consider slip-streaming an XP SP3 disk and add the RAID drivers you'd be using. Then you won't need a floppy drive, or require the F6 option. We also use StorageCraft's tools which allows restoring a Windows image to a different hardware configuration using a boot DVD. You can add RAID drivers etc from a USB stick, external drive etc. in the boot environment. Works like a charm, and a 200GB image is done from eSATA in 20 minutes. It also has network functions from the boot environment so you can image from a NAS unit.

 

[thiggins]

Is there an option to disable or enable the RAID array's boot? If this is set to "enabled" (in situations where you don't want to) I've seen issues regardless of the boot order.

The Intel BIOS reports that the RAID array is bootable. But I don't see a BIOS option to disable that.

I got it running using an IDE disk to boot. Now, I'm trying to find out why all my iozone tests show lousy throughput once I hit 64 KB file size....

Frustrating day...