New to RAID - Question.

[Swiss]

I'm new to RAID, today I installed a PCI RAID card in my work machine, configured as RAID 1 (mirrored) with two Maxtor 80GB drives. Mainly to add a bit more backup along with my regular backups to a removable hard drive.

Originaly, I had just the one 80GB hard drive in there which has been running for about a year so far, along with the newly installed RAID card was a brand new Maxtor 80GB drive of the same model number.

Now, setup and configuration of the RAID card went well, but there doesn't appear to be a lot of disc activity going on, I would assume it would be copying my original drive over to the new blank one in idle time, or in times with minimal disc activity. But theres not much light flashing going on!

Should I have at least partitioned the drive before hooking it up to the RAID card? I just took it out of its vacuum packed antistatic bag and plugged it in, assuming the RAID card would do all of the rest...

Anyone care to shed some light on what I should have done, or what is supposed to happen?

Many thanks.

[directhex]

what's the card? usually, you'll need to use some kind of utility to force re-mirroring of a degraded (non-identical) raid1 array

[Swiss]

The card is not manufactured by a big name, theres no distinct name on the box, card or documentation, as far as I see it the manufacturer may be called "For Best Ports Connection"... But, the card is based on the Silicon Image Sil 0680 chip.

[directhex]

urgh

SiI0680A has a management app of some kind - check the silicon image website

alternatively, you could be suffering from the same bug that made me throw my SiI0680A into the kitchen sink - where it would start a rebuild, then change its mind & stop after an hour (and drop a drive from the array at random)

[Swiss]

Just after my post I was actually searching the Silicon Image site (which might have been a good idea to begin with) and found an app called Medley - Just installed and have a browse and appears to be what I was looking for...

It reports that the rebuild of the degraded drive is at 36%, so I guess I'll leave it too it. After reading the documentation of the Medley software, which included more information about the 0680 than the documentation that came with the board, it appears that if I didnt ask the card to autoconfigure during initial setup at boot there would have been an option to copy the whole source disc to the destination.

So in conclusion, the degraded drive is being rebuilt slowly, and the activity lights for both drives are flashing in sync for short bursts every so often (I have the mirrored drive in a removable drive tray - has its own activity light).

Thanks for the help directhex.