ORLM makes me livid.

[frozenasset]

Several months ago I bought a single Seagate 320gb 7200.10 drive. I liked it's performance "a lot" and bought another, a Highpoint 2310 SATA controller card and striped them. I started running out of space quickly (Think hundreds of hours of TV shows) and bought a third Seagate, using Highpoints OCE (Online Capacity Expansion) to up the size of the array to 960ish GB.

Thinking I was pushing my luck, and knowing how ****** I would be if I lost all that data, I decided to buy a 4th Seagate 320gb drive and use Highpoint's ORLM (Online RAID Level Migration) feature to migrate from a RAID 0 to a RAID 5 array. No biggie right? The card should do that no problem, that's one of it's "features".

WRONG.

So we go back to my title. Livid. That's the term I can describe myself as being after four days of trying to finish the ORLM.

The process abruptly stopped at 80ish% and swore up and down at me that I had lost communication with the Localhost. That must be the all knowing God in the Highpoint RAID Management Console that allows me to go from Level 0 to 5 in, Oh, 8 hours or so. After a few timeouts trying to summon the Localhost, and my system performance dropping considerably, I figured REBOOT!

No luck, now I had to reinitialize all over from the beginning. So another 8 hours or so wasted.

Then, again, at 80ish%, I lost contact with the Localhost. The ******* must be going out for beer and brats or something....

However, for the last several hours I had paused the migration process several times which apparently saves it, cause when I logged back into windows, I was able to start again at 78%. Cool.

Sooooooo not cool.

Third time contact was lost at 80ish%. Again with the reboot, and again with the contact being lost.

So I started googling. Not finding much other than a long shot, flash the card's BIOS and make sure drivers are the latest.

One BIOS flash later and a driver refresh and now the damn RAID card is squawking at me! Beepbeepbeepepepepep. W T F Mate? Open up the management console and I see random disconnects on channel 3.

Ok. Maybe, just maybe the cable is bad or something. So I shutdown, replace the cable. Same problem. Shutdown again, move the card to different PCIe slot. Same problem. Mark the cables and drives, start swapping cables around.

WHALA. I now have no disconnects on Channel 3 and it's gone past 85%, more than ever before.

SQUAWK! Beepepepepepepe. Random disconnects on Channel 3 again. W T F.

Highpoint's support is nonexistant, so I did what any other (now insane) person would do.

Entered the Highpoint BIOS and killed the arrays. Both the 5 and the 0 which was unrecognized in Vista at this point anyway. And lost all my TV shows and plethora of applications I have moved from PC to PC for the last 8 or so years. Sniff. Sniff.

Hope someone else is able to get ORLM to work, cause I damn sure won't try again.

And forget RAID 5, I'll screw more up trying to get to it then I have a chance of a drive failing in the next 3 years. And by that time I'll want the newest storage device anyway.

I figure the problem occurred when I had almost all of the first two drives filled up and added a third, which essentially gave me two drives in RAID 0 and a third drive with nothing on it. Then adding a fourth which migrated some of the data from drive 1 and 2 to 3 and 4 while simultaneously adding parity to all 4 drives (is that right?) and it was too much for the Localhost God.

He must not be all knowing after all eh? Thanks for reading!

[frozenasset]

Couldn't leave well enough alone.

Again, I tried "farking" with it. Lost some more data, but could have recovered it, didn't really care as it wasn't as pressing as my first loss.

I started fresh, took three drives and created the array in the management software in Windows. Did foreground initialization, took a while, but when I got back to it, I had a 640ish GB drive, in RAID 5. (Fourth drive is now in my TiVo HD)

Disabled the Vista drive in BIOS, installed XP Pro SP2 without a hitch (had the controller's drivers slipstreamed in the install) and am relatively happy with the performance and reliability of this setup.

As a bonus, my MB allows me to specify on each reboot which device to boot from, so I'm keeping my Vista installed on the raptor, with the My Documents directory moved to a partition on the array and have XP SP2 for gaming. I have the drive letters removed for the Vista drive in XP, and vice versa in XP so I don't mess anything up. They're there if I need em, but not in the way. And I'm amazed at just how loud the raptor is. My seagates are whisper quiet.

[Spawn_abx]

That's an insane setup!

I wonder if the problem was the Raptor...

What patience you have! LOL

[mmnmaniac]

Hi jvandecar,

I'm experimenting with using the same Highpoint controllers to do OCE/ORLM.. did you *ever* get it to work? Any updates?

I tried a PM, but you don't accept messages

Thanks in advance!