RAID 5 Problems - I Have to reactivate everytime I log in..

[pixelharmony]

Hey everyone, after following the guide on Tom's Hardware I finally have a RAID 5 array setup on XP Pro.

One problem is though that the RAID array seems to deactivate everytime I shut down Windows. I have to go into disk management and power it back on everytime I restart.

Is there a way to bypass this issue I'm having?

Thanks

 

[Pain]

You mean a software array?

Link to the article you used to set it up.

 

[pixelharmony]

http://www.tomshardware.com/2004/11/19/using_windowsxp_to_make_raid_5_happen/

 

[pixelharmony]

Anyone?

It's sort of annoying to reactivate everytime. Sometimes the RAID array regenerates for no reason at all.... it's all getting prety anoying.

 

[Pain]

My take on it is this. If the motherboard dies or you have an OS meltdown, etc, then you're going to lose the array along with all your data. Anyone even marginally serious about running a raid5 array should be using a real controller. That's my opinion.

I understand that one might be on a budget, and from a gee-wiz perspective it might be fun to mess with it, but I wouldn't use that solution if I cared at all about my data.

With all that said, it's probably going to be difficult to find anyone who can offer much advise on troubleshooting that set up...probably for the same reason I said above, because anyone serious about running a raid5 array is going to be using a real controller.

 

[pixelharmony]

You know, I was thinking that as well.

But if my motherboard died wouldn't I be able to rebuild this array only through windows? I know the software array can't be cross compatible with a hardware array... but to my understanding within windows OS's this would work.

 

[blue68f100]

Sound like the config file is not being saved. Ran in to the same problem with FreeNAS. Sorry I can't be of any more help.

 

[pootle]

My take on it is this. If the motherboard dies or you have an OS meltdown, etc, then you're going to lose the array along with all your data. Anyone even marginally serious about running a raid5 array should be using a real controller. That's my opinion.

We've been running software raid 5 under windows for years now, and we carefully checked recovery when we first built it. We can take all the discs and stick them in another windows box and pick up all the data, so its more flexible than a hardware raid as I don't need a special working hardware raid card. Performance on write obviously isn't as good as a card with hardware XOR, but it works just fine for us.