RAID 5 on Dell XPS 420

[ezioarmando]

I have a Dell XPS420, which came with 2 500GB disks in RAID0. I later bought a third identical disk, and connected it to a motherboad SATA port (just like the other 2).

The Intel Matrix Storage Manager can see the third disk (and I can use as a non-RAIDed disk), but I am not able to have it join the primary array, which I would have liked to migrate from RAID0 to RAID5 with the third disk.

Intel Matrix Storage Manager documentation says migration from RAID0 to RAID5 should be possible, but the tool doesn't let me modify the volume (the only allowed change is volume name, the rest is "greyed out").

Is this a limitation of my hardware, or some software/configuration thing I missed? Any know work-arounds?

Thanks for the help!

 

[rockchalk]

From looking at the docs on your particular system at:
http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/xps420/en/index.htm

The manual mentions RAID0 and RAID1. From this, it looks like your system only has support for RAID0 and RAID1.

Intel Matrix Storage Manager can support RAID0, RAID1, RAID5, RAID10, etc. However, not all these features are enabled on every platform. It would appear that your platform only supports RAID0 and RAID1.