Talk:Firewire Software RAID using Oxford 911 and Windows XP

You may consider looking at the following site that tells you how to hack windows 2000 or windows xp to allow software raid 0 and 5.

http://members.home.nl/rvandesanden/raid3.html

I started to try this but hit the wall when I realised that external USB disks cannot be converted to dynamic disks. So as suggested in the wiki, I will mount both disks on an IDE inteface and see what I see after I remount them in the USB enclosures.

It works
I've tried creating a dynamic disk plugged into a PC under Win2k, and then placing this disk in an external USB enclosure.

Initially the drive came up with a red symbol in disk administrator, but I was able to right-click and select "Reactivate Disk" and this then displayed succesfully. Dynamic disks under USB2 work just fine.

Second confirmation: I did this also, and it didn't even require "reactivate" (this is under XP Pro with the RAID-enabling hack). It did complain that it wasn't able to update the boot.ini file properly because the "SCSI controller" (haha) for the USB drive "wasn't responding" -- but that just means it probably won't boot from the USB drive, which is fine.

I have done this pretty successfully
I did this maybe 2.5 years ago with some limited success, and just decided to plug it in again a few days ago.

I bought 10 911 firewire bridges. Made the registry hack. For an enclosure I bought a metal toolbox, and filled it with 10 120gb drives (at the time 120gb drives were the best capacity per dollar). Basically, I drilled holes in the back of the toolbox and mounted the drives on one side, with the interface side facing upwards. I then mounted an Antec power supply in the middle of the toolbox (and cut a vent in the back for the fan of the power supply. I had to short one of the pins on the power supply, so it would be always "switched on". I used Y-connectors to power all the drives and bridges.  This seemed like it would be much cheaper and easier than buying and powering a lot of firewire enclosures.

Net result, was a dynamic spanned XP volume with about 1.1TB of space for roughly $2700, which was an excellent deal at the time (quite terrible now, of course).

I used it for quite some time, but it was never really stable. I thought it was because I was using just loose bridge boards, or figured my cabling was weak somewhere, but never quite figure out the reliability problems. I kept getting delayed-write failures. I googled to no avail.

It turns out since then, that there has been 2 proposed resolutions for that problem. One is a firmware upgrade for the Oxford chip. The second, is upgrading to SP2. As I am no longer running anything other than SP2, just out of curiosity I grabbed the thing out of the closet and plugged it in. Since then it has worked perfectly. I also ran across the Tom's Hardware article the other day and upgraded the disk to use RAID-5 rather than spanned. It does seem a lot slower now :)

Anyway, if any one is interested I could probably snap a few pictures. It's pretty funny looking, closed it's hard to tell from all but one side, it's anything other than a red metal toolbox. If it had worked better at the time, I would have probably taken pictures and posted on Slashdot and declared myself a genius.

CU

poor results w/ initio 2340l
under windows 2000 server i wanted to put 3 pata drives in an enclosure and run software Raid 5.

i get a blue screen before i finish regenerating. something about memory management. i'll look into it more later but it seems that there is very little info out there on initio (a.k.a inic) 2430L or 2430.

am i correct that with oxford drives under windows software raid 5 that when you restart the drives are immediately online and do not show as failed and require a reactivation.

any other resources out there for win sw raid 5 w/ external enclosures.

thanks.

Diskpart
Using Diskpart does not work - the command line follows the same policy setting as the GUI Disk Manager and will not allow you to convert a USB volume into a dynamic disk. Microsoft admits this is by policy (1), and not due to any hardware limitation, due to them believeing it to be too unreliable.

1. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/300415

Dynamic disks, USB
"I think WindowsXP only puts "dynamic" drives into a RAID array."

All Windows versions (except NT4) allow RAID only on dynamic disks.

Could a USB disk be converted to dynamic by cloning to it an existing dynamic disk ?