SIIG 4-channel RAID issues
Please help if you have any ideas.
I have the SIIG 4-Channel SATA RAID PCI controller card on my ASUS A7N8X-Deluxe 2.0.0 MoBo (Win XP SP1 slipstreamed, AMD XP 2800+, 1GB Kingston RAM Dual channel). My intention is to set up a RAID 10, for speed and redundancy.
Any time I set up any RAID configuration, I get data corruption. RAID 0 and 1 works fine with the on-board controller, but not thru the card. Only single drive arrangement works on the card. WTF?
So, I try to RMA with SIIG. I get some non-english speaking (most likely) test response that "It's probably not compatible with your hardware. PLease try to return it to your direct vendor." Fine, but there's NO WAY of identifying with what hardware the controller is compatible, nor is there any way to test the controller to see if it is just plain old busted.
The thing I hate the most is no matter WHAT question I ask tech support, I ALWAYS GET THE SAME F-ing ANSWER BACK! SIIG has the WORST customer service I have ever seen for PC hardware! :banghead:
I have the SIIG 4-Channel SATA RAID PCI controller card on my ASUS A7N8X-Deluxe 2.0.0 MoBo (Win XP SP1 slipstreamed, AMD XP 2800+, 1GB Kingston RAM Dual channel). My intention is to set up a RAID 10, for speed and redundancy.
Any time I set up any RAID configuration, I get data corruption. RAID 0 and 1 works fine with the on-board controller, but not thru the card. Only single drive arrangement works on the card. WTF?
So, I try to RMA with SIIG. I get some non-english speaking (most likely) test response that "It's probably not compatible with your hardware. PLease try to return it to your direct vendor." Fine, but there's NO WAY of identifying with what hardware the controller is compatible, nor is there any way to test the controller to see if it is just plain old busted.
The thing I hate the most is no matter WHAT question I ask tech support, I ALWAYS GET THE SAME F-ing ANSWER BACK! SIIG has the WORST customer service I have ever seen for PC hardware! :banghead:
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Comments
You have tried moving it to a differant slot? You get four board level IRQ's for all pci devices and usb, onboard sound and lan etc.. The slot it sits in and this what it shares with is critical. Next the windows layer thanks to acpi/apic has a whole differant set of virtual IRQ's and you need to make sure its not sharing with another device there also.
Check back after that and lets see if the address space is conflicting with another device in teh device manager.
And.......... raid-10 is really better suited for a higher end card. Like a 3ware card. I know you say you get corruption on any raid with teh sig but... when you go to the trouble of setting up a raid-10 and your depending on it for data security I just don't think SIG is the answer.
Also... Raid-10 is not a way to get around doing backups right? It only prortects against drive failure not data corruption from a controller or user error or virus's or.... any of the other gazillion things that can go wrong when you reach for the backup disks.... running two in raid-0 and two non raided and doing backups is really a better solution usually.
Cheers
Get me more info and we can trouble shoot it together.
Tex
Yes, ANY RAID configuration results in data corruption. I have the latest drivers for the controller card, latest MoBo drivers, and latest MoBo BIOS. All drives are sound, and cables obviously are because they work fine in non-RAID setup.
I have not tried moving to another slot yet. I just want my system to be stable for a change. I know that could be an issue, but considering the vast number of people who have RAID issues with this MoBo... My AGP card has a fan/sink combo on it, so the upper 2 PCI slots are inaccessible. The bottom 3 are available. I currently have the controller in slot 3. I forgot about the APIC thing (I am a little behind on my hardware know-how these days)... I do not see any conflicts in the WinXP device manager. Is there another place I can check for conflicts?
How do I back up a RAID 0 to 2 independant drives? Can this be scheduled? You are correct in assuming I am simply looking for data security; I want the speed of RAID 0, but the security of RAID 1.
When I was asking if other devices were interefering I was going more for you checking the device manager go to "view" make sure you have show hidden devices check and go to resources by connection. Check IRQ's and resources by type I think it is..... and check and make the memory addresses for the devices are not overlapping. I had probs with my big scsi raid controllers at times overlapping memory address's with other cards and I would have to uninstall and reinstall crap untill I could get everything to work right and fit in to play well with each other.
You can also try and use powerstrip and what the latency of the pci card is set to. Sometimes the latency is to low and the card doesnt have time to complete its writes for example and it should... in theory....then wait for the next round and complete it then but if the driver isnt properly written it may not hold the write properly and things get fubar'd. As stuff keeps pouring in durring heavy I-O and it basicaly sh*ts in its pants finally and starts droping stuff.
But if your asking ME my opinion on what to do and seeing as how you think the onboard raid-0 works and the SIG also works in a non-raid environment then why not raid-0 two drives using the onboard and backup the sata to the non-raided drives on the SIG?
As far as the backup it depends on what your trying to backup. Keeping an "image" of the OS and programs to reinstall to with say.... Drive Image, Ghost, or Acronis (my fav) tucked back and then I just 'copy" my user data daily or every day or every few days so my datafiles, porn (I mean pics) and Outlook etc... was always backed up is OK for me. My biggest loss at times would be my email itself....My MP3's do not change often and I keep a extra copy or two of that directory on my home network as well as multiple copies of stuff like my "installs directory" or directory of ISO's etc.. they don't chage often adn I copy them weekly not daily. I have multiple dual opterons with scsi raid on a gigabit LAN and each computer has at least one 120gb maxtor ide also to backup on I can backup across myu network pretty easy.
Tex
http://www.asus.com/pub/ASUS/mb/socka/nforce2/a7n8x-deluxe/e1292_a7n8x_deluxe.zip
Oh... I'll check the device manager again, to be sure.
Hmm... what is powerstrip and how tdo I adjust latency? The card's specs look like it should be able to handle everything just fine... though I have completely lost confidence in this manufacturer.
Well, I currently have my on-board set as RAID 1, to keep stuff on that drive more reliably stored. The 2 on the card are independant fdrives. I didn't know you COULD back up a RAID 0 to 2 independant drives? How are you doing that? I assume you set the 2 independants as dynamic disks and mount the second as a virtual extension of the first through the Windows Disk Manager? After that, simply xcopy everything to the 2 standalones?
At the very least, I want to keep my media and installer files backed up. It would be nice to be able to seamlessly recover the OS, though.