PS: Before I start, it took me about 10 minutes to find how to post a question on this site after viewing pages and pages of threads... Why isn't there a menu on each page?
So... 3days into trying to upgrade my RAID from 1TB drives to 2TB... a Nightmare.
I first had copied all the data on one new 2TB drive, and then tried to 'Migrate' to a second 2TB drive by creating a RAID Volume.
No luck: the Matrix Storage Console would always fail on creating the Volume. The reason, I beleive, is that it can't support 2TB drives: the Min and Max values are all messed up, but not editable (min volume size is 1863GB, max is 0, doesn't seem right!)
So then I pull one of the 1TB disk and replace with 2TB and you get a degraded volume that is rebuilt on a 2TB drive.
Do that twice and you get the full RAID rebuilt on 2TB drives... BUT YOU STILL HAVE ONLY 1TB and no way to expand the volume.
I tried expanding under Linux without any luck.
Next thing I tried, I broke the Volume and I got 2x 2TB drives partitionned down to 1TB. With that kind of a partition, I could actually create a Volume properly and migrate to the second 2TB drive.
I'm now the proud owner of a 2TB RAID 1.
Yet, there are more troubling issues with Intel 'RST'
I use the driver Intel(R) ICH8R/ICH9R/ICH10R/DO/PCH SATA RAID v8.9.1023 but there are several newer ones on the site, including a v12.9.0.1001 which installed fine on my computer, but then causes the Console (Manager) to fail opening the data...
So what's up with this? The Manager is from 2009 (v8.9.1023 like the driver) but new drivers are not supported and there is no new version of the manager?
I could not find any official information anywhere about any kind of size limitation of the chipset in terms of drive size, but obviously the Manager has issues with large drives. It still seems to be possible to make a large volume by partitioning only half way, then expanding the volume, but that doesn't seem right and I really wonder if I should trust this Intel Chipset to handle my drives properly...
I see reports of crashes, hangs and such when writing past a point on large drives. I'm trying to test that by filling the drive as we speak... but it takes forever, and I wish there were clearer info on here!
So:
- What is the actual drive size limitation of the ICH9R chipset?
- Is there a new version of Intel Matrix Manager Console past 8.9?
- How do I verify my drives migrated properly without having to do a CRC on every single file?
Thanks for any useful input.
Regards