eSATA Raid drive

eSATA Raid drive - PLEASE HELP!

Hi Dudes

Just bought ( should arrive in a day or so ) a Lacie 2Big Dual 1T external raid drive ( via eSATA ). Just a quick thought, As I plan to use it in a Raid 0 set up do I need to make any adjustments to my bios or install the JMicron drivers so Vista can utilise the raid as well as my other three, non raid, sata drives.

I've looked at the manual and doeesn't mention any thing about it.

Or is it simply plug it in and forget.


Cheers

Hi Damocles,

You will usually need to set your BIOS and RAID controller settings for this. I would also check with your motherboard's software download site and use the latest chipset, BIOS, RAID drivers, etc.. to help make your system more stable.

This tutorial by Grimace may help to.

http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/79013-raid-install.html

Hope this helps,
Shawn

Many thanks Brink.

No doubt I will report back if I have problems.

AArrgh!!!

The drive finally arrived...Nice one DHL for your utter incompetence.

I have a problem with the eSATA connection. USB works fine although formating take ages.

I have enabled the Jmicron in my bios and set it to raid ( other options are IDE/ ACHI(?) )

After reboot I press Ctrl J to set the raid and it states that there are not enough drives to create a raid drive. The Lacie 2 big dual has two drives in the enclosure. I suspect Jmicron is reading the Device as one big drive. The device is set to Fast (raid 0)

So I exit that and windows loads as usual. The device is recognised and vista asks for the Jmicron driver. I install the 64 bit drivers from the asus website and it tells me that they are not signed and cannot proceed.

What can I do? I have currently have a rather expensive 1Tb bookstand.

Any advice is warmly welcomed as I'm sure I'm the only one to have had problems like this.

Damocles,

Did the drive come with any drivers? If not, you might email Asus to see if they have a driver version that is signed.

Shawn

Hi Brink,

I'm going to try again.

Under vista 64 there are two Jmicron drivers


RAID_NonIDE_JMicron_JMB36X11781_Vista.zip
JMicron JMB36X RAID Controller Driver V1.17.8.1 for Windows 32bit/64bit Vista.(WHQL)

and


JMicron JMB36X RAID Controller Driver V1.17.3.2 for Windows Vista(WHQL) & 64bit Vista(WHQL).

I'm pretty sure I installed the last one.

When I reboot vista stops installing due to jraid.sys(or dll) not being signed and I have to do 'last known configuration' to get the OS to load.

The supplied cd has manuals and one click back up software - no drivers


I hope you can help.

Chris

Well, That seemed to have fixed it.

Drive recognised and windows now loads without any errors

Damolces,

I'm glad to hear that is is working now.

Shawn

Eeerrrrrrr, Well...it's sort of working. It works fine with the USB interface albeit slowly ( as you would expect).

But I need it to run in eSATA mode as I have massive files and was hoping for a raid 0 scratch disk.

This is what I have done to date to try to get the eSATA to work

In the bios - set Jmicron to enable > Raid
reboot
the external drive is recognised ( as one volume with 1000mb - despite having two drives ) and windows loads normally......Fine.

Jmicron driver is installed and looks fine.

2 big dual is set to Fast (Raid 0) and the confirm button is pressed to finish the raid set up.

The volume is formatted and the drive is ready to use showing around 935mb available.

I move some images on the Raid drive and they write OK

BUT! when I load Photoshop, or any other program, to read the files - the load bar moves quickly up to around a third of the way and then it stops and it crashes Photoshop - resource manager show disk read times at around 90mb/s then it rapidly goes down to 0mb/s and stays there. This happens when in Raid 1, Raid 0, JBOD mode via eSATA.....everything seems fine when it's in USB.

Also when I run a disk check / disk benchmark t locks up windows when it has to read the files --- sometimes when I format it locks windows.

Sometimes the 2 big dual would report a blinking red light on the left hand drive which suggests a faulty drive. I have taken both drives out of the enclosure and tested them which my internal power supply and sata connections and the drives are good.

There are quite a few report about faulty power supplies not giving enough juice to the drives....I wonder if this is the case for my drive

Any ideas on this.....I just want to damn thing to work.

Cheers

Chris

Chris,

I wish I knew more about external RAID devices for you.

It may be a problem with the LaCie enclosure since the drives seem to work fine when placed inside the case.

I'm not sure if this is the model you have, but you should check at LaCie for any driver, firmware, or software updates that may help. If not, you may also contact the support at LaCie to see what they say or if anyone else has experineced this to.

LaCie - 2big Triple (2-disk RAID) - FireWire 800, FireWire 400 & Hi-Speed USB 2.0

Hope this helps,
Shawn

Cheers Brink,

It's very similar to the 2big triple but it only has eSATA and Usb2 interfaces with no Firewire.

I suspect its my on-board eSata connection or the raid card inside the enclosure.

I've sent a tech support ticket to Lacie.....The Lacie website shows no drivers / firmware updates as yet.

I appreciate your help

Chris

Your welcome Chris. Keep us updated on what they say to help others that may have the same problem.

Shawn

One step closer.

I started to think about the problem and what is going on........

The fundamental issue seems to be Jmicron is looking for two devices for the raid setup....and maybe this is reflected in the windows driver.

So I uninstalled the Jmicron driver > reboot > set the bios > jmicron from raid to IDE

loaded vista and it recognised and automatically installed the device as an external drive - which it didn't do before.

Small files ( 250mb) see a transfer rate of 120mb/s but my large files ( 7gb - 15gb ) do take longer with transfer rates of 49 - 90mb/s .

In photoshop the images load, which is great as they didn't before, but I get a disk error stating that image is corrupt or there is a damaged disk. They do open but parts of the image has lost data - So there is a problem with the drive. It also drops it's connection every now and then. I'll report this to LaCie and see what they say......

But I'm one step closer to sorting this issue out.......I'll post next time I make a development.


Chris

Check disk fixed the file and disk errors- Images loads without errors - my guess is bad sectors were created when I had to soft boot when vista locked up during formating....could be wrong on that though

Thank you for the feedback Damocles. I'm happy to hear that you have it sorted out now.

Shawn

Pleasure...I hope the info saves someone from many days of troubleshooting.