Help w/RAID 5 Setup

[jml2]

I need some help with RAID 5 set up. First, here's my setup:

A8N-SLI Premium, BIOS Revision 1009
AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ Toledo
Gigabyte nVidia GeForce 7600GT SilentPipe II
Corsair Twinx 2048-3200c2 (2GB, dual channel)
1 Seagate Barracuda SATA 3Gbs 160GB Drive on nVidia SATA Controller as boot drive
4 Western Digital Caviar WD4000YR 400GB drives on Sil3114 Controller for storage
1 Digital Audio Labs CardDeluxe for D/A conversion and sound
1 , Hauppague WinTV PVR250MCE
WinXP MCE

As per the description above, I have a 160GB drive on the nVidia SATA controller as the boot drive. I got the system up and running, everything working fine. (This forum and others were helpful on RAM timing settings, etc., thanks to all who post.)

Next step was to create a RAID 5 storage volume, so I added four (4) 400GB drives to the Sil3114 controller. The machine boots fine, the Sil3114 BIOS recognizes the drives, and allows me to create a RAID group.

Here I get a bit lost because the documentation is pretty lousy and contradictory. When I reboot after creating the RAID group with the BIOS utility, the Sil Array Manager won't let me use the RAID group I created in the BIOS (sees it as a legacy group, and when I try to convert or delete it, the utility says the volume has a pending operation). So I go back into the BIOS and delete the RAID group, boot WinXP, and then try to create new group in the SAM utility. The utility sees the drives, allows me to open the dialog to create a new group, which I configure for Parity RAID (RAID 5) as per the documentation. When I hit the CREATE button, I get this error message: The Requested Operation Failed: Processing Error.

I went back into the BIOS and created the group again, and Windows sees the dynamic disc, and allows me to create and format a volume, but only a simple volume. So at this point, I'm confused. Is the BIOS ensuring RAID 5? Or do I have a problem? Instincts tell me that I should be able to set up and manage the RAID 5 group via the supplied utility. I've searched a good bit and can't find anyone who's done this.

Any help in solving this problem is much appreciated.

 

[klickcue]

The reason that you can't modify your RAID5 group is because SAM (Sil Array Manager) is busy initializing the array.

Create your RAID5 in the bios like you have done before. When SAM appears after the boot, you will see your drives but the color will be Yellow. You will have to wait 8 to 12 hours for your array to finalize. After the array is built, your drives will be colored Green. You will see Parity RAID and size in your RAID Group. Parity RAID is RAID5.

Don't try to format your array until the array is built.

If you open RAID Group Summary and Window Task Manager you can see what is going on. You will have to select Options and add all the fields. In Task Summary, you will see your Start Time and the Remaining time for the initialization.

Do any of your write intensive work on your nVidia boot drive. RAID5 will protect your data but is slow to write to but pretty good to read from.

 

[jml2]

Thanks for the reply klickcue. As you can tell, I was/am a noob when it comes to RAID. After posting here, I began to figure this out, and now the system is working fine, and things went just as you described. Thanks for the help.