Setup RAID Card BIOS
After you have rebooted from changing the mobo BIOS settings, it’s now time to setup the RAID card BIOS settings. To do this, let the PC boot up past your motherboards BIOS screen, then the RAID card BIOS will show up. You may need to wait as it attempts to initialize disks (which it will fail to do because none are configured yet) then it will show you the key combination to enter the BIOS, usually Ctrl+N for Dell PERC cards, Ctrl+H for LSI MegaRAID. Once inside the BIOS we can now setup our disks for RAID. To find out how to navigate the BIOS look at the bottom of the screen and you should see the key legend.
- Firstly, we need to make all 4 hard drives RAID capable, so hit the Configuration or Operations key (usually F2) and look for an item called Make RAID Capable, then select all 4 disks using the SPACEBAR on your keyboard, then TAB to select OK and hit ENTER
- Hit the Configuration or Operations key again and look for Create VD or Creat RAID, select it and hit ENTER
- Choose RAID-5 as the RAID level, select all 4 disks using the SPACEBAR, leave the Size GB option at default max or enter the maximum size allowed, enter a name for your RAID array (ie VOL0 or RAID5_VOL) now TAB to Advanced Settings and for Strip Size choose 64KB or 128KB and select the Initialize option, leave all other settings at defaults unless you know what you’re doing (or there are additional required settings not in this guide)
- Finally TAB to the OK menu item and hit ENTER on your keyboard to finalize your new RAID array
- Open your DVDRW drive and insert your NAS OS disk ready for reboot
Some NAS OS is against hardware RAID, for example http://www.freenas.org/blog/freenas-worst-practices/
How do you comment on this?
Hi there, hardware RAID is fine except on ZFS volumes which is designed to communicate directly with the hard drives. The ZFS file system is fast and very reliable and is an alternative to traditional hardware RAID systems. cheers, Richie