What i did on an old gigabyte 478 socket board was put in a promise fastTrax tx2300 with 2 1tb wd blacks on the pci bus. when it starts up, watch for the setup at which time i hit ctrl+f to bring up the config of the array. Configed as raid 1 say yes to both drives and ctrl+y to make the array and reboot. WHS install i load the driver from floppy f6 and away it goes. Did mess it up onces but when i tried to reinstall whs it would come back with errors. So i when back to the promise config, broke the array and started a new one and reinstalled whs without problems. I found that the only way i could get whs to install was to do that because it was not formating the first install where the errors or in this case partions were. Hope that gives you some help. I was going to get that card you have but went with the promise because they just work. :] P.S. you also need two drvs for an array to work or set the card up for jbod if it's supported.
Yes, that's interesting. I did not initially think of RAID because as I understand since coming to this forum, I should avoid RAID in WHS. It is good that you have found a way to make it work, but my thought is that I wouldn't choose RAID 1 because between folder dup, WHS BDBB, and external usb backups, I'd have it covered. Plus, the overhead of RAID 1 would be too much for an Athlon 2700+ single core system, no? <- I'm guessing about that since I don't have any experience with RAID, just the little I've read.
Yes, I'm tempted to try another SATA card, perhaps the Promise card you mentioned, because it would be an inexpensive upgrade. Thus far, I've only spent money for a gigabit LAN card. Everything else is spare parts. :)
Having said those things, the SATA card came flashed with a RAID BIOS. So, I went into the RAID Configuration utility and configured the drive for 'Concatenation ', as that was the only option available for a single HDD. I am guessing that this is my mobo RAID Configuration utility's way of saying JBOD, which if I understand JBOD, presents all HDD's connected via SATA card as one single huge HDD. After thinking about this, and having failed several attempts to install WHS with this configuration, I decided that this might not be a good hardware config to present to WHS since DE has its own way of managing drive space. So I did some research and found that I could flash the card with a SATALink BIOS.
If I understood correctly, SATALink does not support RAID, but rather provides SATA connection(s) much like any motherboard-attached SATA connector. In other words, SATALink presents SATA HDD's to an OS in a way that is indistinguishable from SATA HDD's connected directly to the mobo. <- Can someone confirm this, please?
As I have since learned, one tricky part of WHS installation is the F6 drivers which must also be provided during the Server 2003 portion. Well, even though I did that, and I took several shots at it, installation inevitably failed with 'Drive Copy Error(s).' It appears that there is something about this SATA card - incompatibility, defect, poor implementation, lousy karma - that makes it useless for my purposes. So, RMA to Newegg.
I may try another SATA card, but whatever the solution, it can't be a kludge because I don't want to risk introducing any system instability.
*For what it's worth - I wanted to see if transfer rates for a HDD attached to this SATA card would be comparable to an HDD attached directly to the mobo. I connected the SATA card w/ 1TB Seagate 7200.12 HDD to my Q9550 system, then ran HD Tune's Transfer Rate test. The average transfer rates (81 MB/sec) were pretty much the same whether the HDD was attached to the SATA card or directly to the mobo.
