SA3200 Disk array controller in PC (was: 5300 Disk array controller in PC)

* Ruud:
> Hallo allemaal,
>
> I put a 5300 Disk controller in an HP Pavilion to see if that works. I
> connected the backplane of an old DL380R01 to the card with two 18.2
> GB disks. The card is recognised because you see the initialisation
> during the power-up of the PC and the card on its turn sees the disks.
> But after starting Windows XP I cannot se the the disks.
>
> What should I do to make use of this card and the disks? (if possible
> at all)

Well, setting up an hardware RAID requires some configuration to assign
the physical drives to a logical array.

First, you have to go into the controllers BIOS setup (ACU, Array
Configuration Utility) and set up some RAID level. With two drives the
only you can do is RAID0 (striping, higher performance and a logical
drive that is as big as the capacity of both disks, but also higher risk
of data loss) or RAID1 (mirroring, average performance, only capacity of
one drive is useable, but higher reliability). Create a RAID array with
your drives and exit.

Second, Windows requires drivers for the controller. There are no
Windowsxp drivers for the Smart Array controllers but you should be able to use the W2k Server drivers from the HP homepage.

After that Windows should see the controller and also the logical drive
in the storage management console. Just create a partition (I'd convert
the drive to "dynamic drive" and then set up a single partition) and
format it, and you're set.

I'd also recommend getting the latest controller firmware from the HP website.

But be aware that the SA3200 is very old, it's also relative slow, and
especially for RAID0 the 32bit PCI bus can be a bottleneck. So don't expect miracles out of it.

Benjamin
.

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