Need help setting up a RAID array

[Sphexi]

I have a 1640 series card, with 4 SATA ports, and three Hitachi 500GB SATA drives connected. I first tried using the BIOS setup, chose RAID5, 64K, and Zero Build, and about halfway through the initialization it just fails out. No specific error given.

I finally decided to set it up in Windows XP, using the software that comes with it. Logged onto the card, chose build Array, same settings, it gets halfway through and just goes crazy, saying that it failed, and that each of the drives wasn't connected or something generic.

Anything specific I need to do, or am doing wrong? Never used one of these before, hoping I don't have to replace anything to use it.

 

[Nothinman]

My first guess would be a drive or cable problem.

 

[Sphexi]

Well, I ended up building it as No Build, then having Windows initialize it and format it. It seemed to work fine, I can store info on it without an issue. Highpoint has next to no info about what a Zero Build is, other than it supposedly builds the parity up, as opposed to No Build, which builds parity as the data is being stored. Is there any difference?

 

[Nothinman]

I would guess that no build is going to hurt performance since it has to do more work as you add data.

 

[Sphexi]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
I would guess that no build is going to hurt performance since it has to do more work as you add data.

Don't care too much about performance, this is a PCI card anyways, so it's very bandwidth limited. It's just there to store video/audio on my HTPC, nothing that high end.

 

[Sphexi]

Well, the card is going back, something is wrong with it and Highpoint only seems to think that all 3 of the brand new drives I got are bad. If it just sits there doing nothing, it works great. But after an hour or two of heavy load, like initializing or verifying, or just copying a lot of data (like 200GB of video over our home network), the card loses all three drives, not just one. They simply stop appearing, and then I have to reload the computer to get them back. I've run Hitachi's drive fitness test on the drives, nothing wrong with them at all.

Instead I've got a Koutech IO-PSA420 coming, it's actually cheaper than this card was (even being shipped internationally), and supports SATAII drives, which won't make much of a difference, but I'm hoping will resolve the issues.

The stupid thing was when I was talking to Highpoint tech services via email, the guy even said that the 1640 was one of their older cards and wasn't very good....what kind of response about their own product is that?

 

[gagnu]

How did the Koutech IO-PSA420 work for you? Is it hardware or software RAID?

 

[Sphexi]

The Koutech is still software, anything under $300 generally will be. It's not as fancy as the highpoint, no software in Windows to look at and no alerting system. Then again it works without issues, didn't sit for hours trying to build an array then fail, it's been running 24/7 for 4 months now and no issues at all. Very heavily used too as our PVR.