Silicon Image SATARAID5 and Reboots
So I have a nice new storage array going for my home using the Sans Digital ESATA case, 4 WD Greenpower drives, and the Silicon Image ESATA card that came with the Sans Digital enclosure. The card comes with software called SATARAID5 that appears to mostly work just fine- it was easy to setup a RAID5 array with my 4 disks, and while I can’t dynamically add more disks too it (it looks like there is some other newer software that supports that kind of thing), overall it works well with one major exception. Before I mention that I should add that I’m just looking for some good reliable mass storage. This isn’t a “backup”, it doesn’t need the highest performance storage possible (although faster is always better), and all that. I’ve tested yanking a hard drive out of the array in mid-file copy and putting it back in later and it rebuilds (takes about 24 hours) but is fine.
The big catch is that everytime I reboot my system it does a rebuild- the management app has a nice UI that says that “Group 0 Volume A was not shutdown properly”, and it kicks off the rebuild which takes a very long time. So far those rebuilds have worked great but its really annoying to have degraded performance and reliability after every reboot.
Anyone have any experience with this stuff or ideas? Is there some way to manually shutdown the volume before I reboot? Some bug fix version that fixes this issue (I’m running SATARAID5 version 1.5.2.1 on Vista 32-bit).
posted in Storage, Technology, Vista | 51 Comments