Raid set up?

[d9pierce]

Hello all and thanks in advance.

I have built a new supermicro server and am ready to set up the drives and operating system but need some detailed help please. I have read tons of articles and posts but cant exactly figure it out from them.

I have a supermicro MB x7dal-e+0 with dual quad zeon processors, 8GB Ram, and I have one SAS backplane that holds (4) 2.5" hot swap drives that are 320GB and run at 10K which are connected to 4 of my SATA headers on the mother board. I also have an SATA backplaneThat holds (8) 3.5" hot swap hard drives which is connected to an SAS card that supports (8) SATA drives with Raid. My Mother board also supports raid. Now, I have 4 identical 500GB HD's (SATA) and four 320GB HD's (SATA) in that backplane. Both motherboard and SAS card came with CD's but no floppy drivers for raid. I can download the raid for the SAS card from Supermicro and create a floppy disk for that but there is no offer to down load raid drivers for my board?

I want to set up (2) of the (4) 2.5" in raid 1 and use one of the additional for Ghost or something similiar and the last one as a spare.

I want to use the (4) 500GB drives on raid 5 striped for database data and the (4) other 320GB as just drives, no raid.

I am just not sure how to set this up in setup. Do I enter CMOS first and set up from there? Do I load operating system and hit f6, put in my floppy for my card, and go from that? Do I need to format all these drives first? I really just need some good directions to follow to do this if one of you would be so kind as I really dont want to do this 10 times on trial and error if you know what I mean.

What do I need to do exactly in order to set this up?

Also, I will be using Windows Vista Ultimate X64 as an OS, Running SQL 2008 and Visual Studio 2008 on this machine.

Thanks so much,
David
d9pierce@mchsi.com

Just reboot, all order will return!

 

[shabaa]

In the manual it tells you how to set up the bios configuration for the various raid set ups. See page 4-5 of the manual. I do not see where you can use both Intel and Adaptec host firmware at the same time. Good luck

 

[sminlal]

Both motherboard and SAS card came with CD's but no floppy drivers for raid.

I'm not quite sure what you're saying here - is there some reason you literally need the drivers on a floppy disk as opposed to the CD?

Motherboard RAID is normally configured through the BIOS options which are typically accessed by pressing DEL or F2 or some other similar key during the initial POST (Power-On Self-Test).

The SAS card may have a similar boot-key option, or the CD that came with it may include a bootable configuration utility. Stick the CD into the drive and try to boot from it to see what happens.

Once you get the RAID set configured and start to install Windows, you'll have an option to load any hardware drivers you need. At that point you should be able to insert the CDs to load in the RAID drivers.