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S5500BC AHCI vs. RAID & added SATA Hot Swap Card

DPars1
Beginner
‎06-18-2014 03:34 PM
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Running a S5500BC with ESRT based RAID1 for OS HDD set and a second RAID1 for DATA set. Would like to add an aftermarket SATA Hot Swap controller to allow local backup onto several 1 TB HDDs in a multi-drive rotation.

Aftermarket controller needs to be run in AHCI mode to provide the Hot Swap capabilities. This has been confirmed in a Win7 Pro environment.

As S5500BC BIOS needs to be run in RAID mode to activate the ESRT for the abovementioned arrays is there any way of adding this # 2 SATA interface under AHCI to coexist with the ESRT capabilities of the MB?

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Daniel_O_Intel
Employee
‎06-20-2014 10:01 AM
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You may need to disable the OpROM on the add-in card in the BIOS, but that's fine because you're not going to be booting from the 1TB HDDs anyway. Other than that, they should coexist fine.

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idata
Employee
‎06-20-2014 10:19 AM
537 Views

Dale,

The AHCI & RAID selection is specifically for the ESRT2 controller. As you mention you're running RAID 1 so you need it to be set to RAID. However, RAID includes AHCI capabilities. Does the ESRT2 controller plug into the add-in adapter? If not, how does the add-in adapter utilize the ESRT2 controller? I don't think you can specify AHCI for an add-in adapter within the S5500BC configuration. But like Dan said maybe disabling the OpROM for the controller would work.

I have a question though, are you using the S5500BC in a SC5650 chassis? If so you can use a hot swap hard disk drive bay to provide hot swap capabilities from the SAS/SATA controller on the baseboard. See the SC5650BCDP http://download.intel.com/support/motherboards/server/s5500bc/sb/e80367002_sc5650bcdp_tps_1_5.pdf Technical Product Specification for more information.

If you're not using an Intel(R) SC5650 chassis, does your chassis offer a hot swap drive bay?

Regards,

John

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idata
Employee
‎06-20-2014 10:34 AM
537 Views

Another thing Dale. Be careful with the break a RAID, rebuild a RAID backup method. If during the rebuild, you have a failure on the second drive, that will cause data loss. A tested backup method to external media is the best way.

John

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