Mark's Blog

Last Saturday my RAID card has arrived. Saving the old system installation (with VMs) was a charm using WS2K8’s backup feature. About half an hour later I’ve put in the new controller, attached three WD6400AAKS an run RAID5 array creation via the card’s firmware menu. (version was 5.2 15728)

Restoring has been trivial. Starting from a Server 2008 DVD (Vista DVD works, too) you can select “full system restore” and have the backup expanded on the new volume (1.2TB, BTW). During building the RAID5 it was done with about 50MB/s. Here’s a video for you to get an idea what it was like.

Thanks to RAID level migration you can also start with a RAID1 (mirroring) at 2 HDDs, then upgrade to a third hard drive and switch to RAID5 in the background. Finally, adding a fourth one you can expand volume size – online! WS2K8 can expand your partitions online, too. Great!

Upgrading to latest BIOS (15753) is done by the storage manager. Windows already ships with old but functioning drivers, therefore booting works without hassle. For Linux, there are such drivers in the kernel. By the way, Adaptec has a linux blog, and here are is another RAID SAS card review.

With three HDDs in RAID5, I have on average 200MB/s read and 100MB/s write performance. Staggered drive spin-up is supported by Western Digital HDDs but not Seagate 7002.11 and 7200.10 (even not by SATA pins etc.) – so watch out buying drives.

Tags: RAID