Server Products
Data Center Products including boards, integrated systems, Intel® Xeon® Processors, RAID Storage, and Intel® Xeon® Processors
4931 Discussions

S5500BC AHCI vs. RAID & added SATA Hot Swap Card

DPars1
Beginner
‎06-18-2014 03:34 PM
2,199 Views

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?

0 Kudos

Link Copied

3 Replies
Daniel_O_Intel
Employee
‎06-20-2014 10:01 AM
933 Views

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.

0 Kudos
Copy link
idata
Employee
‎06-20-2014 10:19 AM
933 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

0 Kudos
Copy link
idata
Employee
‎06-20-2014 10:34 AM
933 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

0 Kudos
Copy link
Reply

Community support is provided Monday to Friday. Other contact methods are available here.

Intel does not verify all solutions, including but not limited to any file transfers that may appear in this community. Accordingly, Intel disclaims all express and implied warranties, including without limitation, the implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement, as well as any warranty arising from course of performance, course of dealing, or usage in trade.

For more complete information about compiler optimizations, see our Optimization Notice.