Not sure if this is the right section so feel free to move this to the right section.
So I have a SuperMicro X11SSH board and I’m trying to make use of the Intel Chipset raid.
ATM I’m waiting on the large drives I ordered but I got some 1tb sata drives that were going to be scrap and figured I’d use them to test.
My boot drive is a Samsung SM961 512gb so I figure if I need to toggle the AHCI/Raid setting that shouldn’t have any issue. (Though I belive I currently have it set to raid)
Well I put in 4 of the 1TB drives and I see them in RST but the “create Volume” button is greyed out, I tried installing the v16 RSTe driver from
Intel RST/RSTe Drivers (newest: v16.0.1.1016/v5.3.1.1020 WHQL)
But after that installed the RSTe app didn’t show even the C236 chipset, so I uninstalled that and left the version I downloaded from SuperMicro.
Is there some step I’m missing? Even though I’m not booting to this raid do I have to try to catch the Ctrl-I prompt? It boots very fast and it has a SuperMicro Splash screen that hides any such prompt.
ATM this is just a test as the large drives I ordered are backordered so I don’t know when they’ll arrive.
I also plan to see if I can find my USB to Sata adapter so I can connect the drives to another computer to confirm they’re not just bad. (They came out of an old SAN and say powered off for I think about a year.)
@DarkLogix :
Since I have no own experience with Intel C236 Chipset Server mainboards like yours, you cannot expect much help from my side.
Regarding the configuration of a RAID array with SuperMicro mainboards I found >this< guide.
Question: Which are the HardwareIDs of your on-board Intel SATA RAID Controller?
Which Intel RST Console Software did you use?
Why didn’t you try to create the Intel RAID array by entering the Intel RAID Utility (either via CTRL+I or - if booting in UEFI mode - from within the BIOS)?
Which version has the Intel RAID ROM resp. the EFI RaidDriver module within your mainboard BIOS?
@Fernando :
1. Which are the HardwareIDs of your on-board Intel SATA RAID Controller?
I’ll check tonight. (presuming dev manager and hardware ID’s would get the info.)
2. Which Intel RST Console Software did you use?
I’ll take a screenshot of it tonight and post, I downloaded it via this link
javascript:redirect(‘ftp://ftp.supermicro.com/driver/SATA/Int…2.1217/RSTe.zip’);
3. Why didn’t you try to create the Intel RAID array by entering the Intel RAID Utility (either via CTRL+I or - if booting in UEFI mode - from within the BIOS)?
I have it booting via UEFI and supermicro hides the post messages (I can hit tab to view them, but the window to see them is so short do to the fast boot time)
With in the BIOS I haven’t seen an option for it (Even though it boots UEFI the bios is still a very basic one)
4. Which version has the Intel RAID ROM resp. the EFI RaidDriver module within your mainboard BIOS?
I’ll see if I can find that.
EDIT by Fernando: Unneeded fully quoted post replaced by a direct addressing (to save space)
An Update.
So as I don’t have a monitor connected to the system I’ve had to use the IPMI interface and oddly it wasn’t passing keyboard input to the BIOS. (I was able to boot to the BIOS and see it but not interact)
I brought a laptop home so I could use IPMI as a monitor and a USB keyboard to interact.
Well although I thought I had set the SATA ports to RAID, I looked now and they were set to AHCI. (I had to reinstall RSTe as it would then no longer open)
I changed that and then booted with all 4 drives removed, then inserted them one at a time, though one of the drives didn’t appear (seems like it might be dead)
So Anyway after messing with that a bit I’m now able to make a RAID volume, I’m hoping the brand new large drives I’m waiting on will work much better.
BTW are there any recommendations for stripe size when using RSTe Raid?
ATM I’m using 4x1tb drives (just for testing) in raid 5, but once the drives I ordered arrive I’ll be using 2x10TB in raid1.
the 1TB drives only have 32MB cache, the 10TB drives have 256MB cache.
I plan to use ReFS on the volume as it’s supposed to be more robust, so then the Block size will be 64k.
The choice of the best stripe size depends on the sort of RAID array and on the size of the mostly processed files.
In my case this is going to be a plex media server so the only files on the raid will be large video files, most will likely be from the PLEX DVR feature (IE OTA recordings) (IE most likely multi-gig files.)
Also it seems the 10TB drives are going to take about a month (way back ordered) so I’m going to go ahead and put my media libraries on the raid 5 array, and deal with moving it to the data later.