p5ad2 and raid 5

  • Thread starter Thread starter Jack Ryan
  • Start date Start date
J

Jack Ryan

I am attempting to configure raid 5 on a P5AD2 Deluxe mainboard using the SI
raid controller - and raid 5 update patch.. I have four identical serial
ata 74 GB raptors - they are not my boot disks, but hopefully an available
array in Windows server 2003 for storage. The drives show up in the Java
run configuration utility, I make the selections and get a proccessing
error...(no matter what my selections are)
Has anyone successfully configured raid 5 on this board? Is there any
documaentaion available for raid 5 setup - the "help" is grayed out in the
program and the Asus web site support lists nothing.
Any help would be appreciated as at this point it is a waste of $.
 
I got the same errors using the drivers that came with the board.
Downloaded the drivers from Asus web site & got it to build the raid 5
parity drives OK
However disk performance is very slow around 9MB per sec.
 
Raid 5 does not work and Asus will not reply or support it.
Be forewarned.
Raid 5 does not work!!!!!
Raid 5 does not work!!!!!!!!!!

Steve Johnson
 
Jack Ryan said:
I am attempting to configure raid 5 on a P5AD2 Deluxe mainboard using the
SI raid controller - and raid 5 update patch.. I have four identical
serial ata 74 GB raptors - they are not my boot disks, but hopefully an
available array in Windows server 2003 for storage. The drives show up in
the Java run configuration utility, I make the selections and get a
proccessing error...(no matter what my selections are)
Has anyone successfully configured raid 5 on this board? Is there any
documaentaion available for raid 5 setup - the "help" is grayed out in the
program and the Asus web site support lists nothing.
Any help would be appreciated as at this point it is a waste of $.
Click to expand...
Just use software RAID5 that comes with the Windows server. In Linux I get:

[root@wysenburg mm]# /sbin/hdparm -t /dev/md5

/dev/md5:
Timing buffered disk reads: 128 MB in 3.03 seconds = 42.24 MB/sec

from a bunch of ATA133 drives on Promise ATA100 TX2 cards - one drive per
channel. This is slightly better than the individual drives:

[root@wysenburg mm]# /sbin/hdparm -t /dev/hde2

/dev/hde2:
Timing buffered disk reads: 96 MB in 3.00 seconds = 32.00 MB/sec

Of course cached reads are faster:

[root@wysenburg mm]# /sbin/hdparm -T /dev/md5

/dev/md5:
Timing buffer-cache reads: 260 MB in 2.00 seconds = 130.00 MB/sec

This is on a dual Celeron 500 system. I think this is hitting the limit of
the 33MHz PCI bus (133MB/s), so using a software RAID isn't hindering the
performance.
 
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