“Captain Literal”.NET

It’s now been almost 3 months since I purchased and built my monster desktop and I’ve had quite a bit of excitement with it.

To start with, the SATA II RAID 5 controller on the ASUS motherboard wasn’t up to spec. It just about worked until I wanted to perform more than one disk operation, then it just died. For example, say I was copying a large file across the network at 100Mbs and wanted to do something else at the same time, the LUN would grind to a halt and windows would error.

To get round this I configured the system to have a RAID 0 LUN instead, forgetting the reasons why I wanted RAID 5 in the first place.

This worked well for a couple of weeks until S.M.A.R.T. started reporting that one of the disks in the system was bad! To be honest, I was surprised at this because Weston Digital run each and every one of their disks in a lab before selling them, but they it was: Disk is about to fail messages and the Windows log full of errors when the disk system stopped.

This is the exact reason I specified RAID 5 when coming up with the specification for the computer. So I decided to implement RAID 5 whilst the failed hard disk was being RMA’ed with Weston Digital – an excellent and hassle free service by the way, I completed a form on their web site, keyed in my credit card details (insurance only) and WD sent be a new HDD within a couple of day. I then had 30 days to send the defective drive back to them else they’d chare by credit card.

After reviewing my options, I decided on a Areca ARC-1210 SAT II PCI Express card to fill the other PCIe x16 slot on the ASUS board. The decision to use this card was mainly based on the requirement to use PCIe and not PCI-X (as my board doesn’t have any PCI-X slots on it) and because Tom rated it very highly (http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/2006/01/02/safer_6_for_raid_controllers1/page12.html). One of the frustrating thing about being a single person on a budget is that the option of buying several cards for different manufactures and testing them yourself is not an option! Because of this, I rely heavily on sites like Tom’s Hardware that benchmark items against its piers and report the results. The downside is that don’t test for compatibility – which is the wall I hit next!

I received and installed my shiny and new RAID controller card and proceeded to fit it into the system – by this point, I had already copied all the data to another machine on the network so was ready for a clean install. The machine booted fine, went through POST where I hopped into the RAID controller’s BIOS and built a RAID 5 LUN spanning all 4 disks, saved, rebooted and proceeded to install Windows Longhorn x64 Beta 2 for a play before setting up the machine for real use. Then the fun started!

Windows completed the first stage of the installation and then rebooted, it was supposed to boot from the RAID LUN and finish setup, but errored in Boot Manager (something about not finding NTOSKRL.EXE). All know that this is bad, without the windows Kernal, no device drivers can be loaded, no user mode and be started and windows just fails.

Oh well thinks I, I’ll go back to Windows 2003 x64 and then Windows 2003 x86, Windows XP (x64 and x86) Vista Beta 2 and all had the same error.

After a week of very frustrating support emails from ASUS on this issue, I concluded that the board and the RAID controller had issues together and replaced the ASUS board with a Gigabyte board – then everything worked fine.

The board I went for in the end was the GA K8N Pro which sports the nVidea Northbridge chipset as after weeks of testing the ASUS board, I concluded that it was the ATI northbridge that had a problem with the RAID controller card.

It’s been in this configuration now for about a month and everything is working fine – and yes, I did get longhorn Beta 2 on for play , but concluded that it’s not ready for real use just yet. Maybe the newly released Beta 2 Refresh will be better? I’ll put it on and have a play to find out.

Performance of the system with this RAID controller in is outstanding, for operations involving data under 128MB, it’s blindingly fast, files bigger then that cause an amusing effect that results in things happening very quickly until the RAID controllers cache is full and then you see is slow down a little.

So what’s the point of this post? I suppose I’m here to tell you that onboard RAID controllers suck and that if you require (or even desire RAID 5 like me) then you need to invest in a good controller card. I suppose RAID 1 was OK with the onboard RAID, it that’s limiting in terms of what you can do.

Filed under: 64 bit