A home system for gaming and storage - part 2

By Richard Altmaier (Intel) (2 posts) on July 17, 2008 at 6:37 pm

In Part 1 I described my goal of a home system combining gaming and storage.  I discovered the Intel DX38BT BoneTrail motherboard and proceeded to configure my system.  Part 1 recorded the steps to get a mirrored system disk installed.  In Part 2, I add the 3rd through 6th drives, to provide expanded storage to hold video source material.

Windows Update

Before proceeding, I encountered a broken aspect of Windows XP, based on my Repair operation earlier.  Repair partially disables the Windows Update feature.  One is then stuck, unable to get further Windows updates, so this must be repaired manually.  Determine if you have this problem by starting Internet Explorer, and go to http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com and try to update.  The file download will occur, but then just one second into the installation, the installation will stop with an error.  A description of this problem is at Microsoft  http://support.microsoft.com/kb/943144 .  The Method 2, to reinstall Windows Update Agent, did not work for me.  Rather it said Update already installed.  Method 1, to run regsvr32, was successful.  Now going to windowsupdate resulted in new downloads and successful installation.

This is a good point to make a further Ghost backup, label it "RAID mode with update fix".

Installing 4 additional drives for mirrored data storage

We are now ready to install a set of 4 drives for data storage, with mirror protection. 

I decided to place these drives in a hot swap bay, with a nice LED readout which shows drive activity for each drive.  It looks a lot cooler too. 

I selected the KingWin KF-4000-BK 3.5” Internal RAID-4 Bay, http://kingwin.com/product_pages/kf4000-bk.asp .  It has two fans for cooling, which are very definitely needed for SATA drives.  And provides loading of drives from the front of the PC.  But there must be space in the front of the enclosure to mount this bay.  It takes up 3 5”-device vertical bays.  There can be no physical obstructions in your enclosure, rather simply open space.

 

 

Compare this image to the image in Part 1  where there was just open space.  I took the opportunity to shift the mirrored pair of system disks down two slots, to the bottom of the chassis.  They mount in a small mechanical adaptor, from the 5” bay to the 3.5” drive size bay, with a fan on the front.

I kept the ordering of the orange SATA cables for these for drives consistent.  The top drive in the 4-drive bay is cabled to the top connector on the motherboard, port 2.  Down through the 4th drive going to port 5.   Know the mapping from motherboard port to physical drive is very, very important in future, should a drive fail, and you must remove and replace exactly and only the correct failing drive ! 

Once these 4 drives are installed, power connected, and SATA cables connected, turn on the computer and let Windows boot. 

Create a 4-drive RAID volume

Now we will use the Intel Matrix Storage Manager User Guide Chapter 9 Volume Creation procedure on the 4 drives on ports 2 through 5 (not touching ports 0 and 1 which contain our system disks).   In Windows, start Intel Matrix Storage Console, and selection Actions Create RAID Volume.   Select a distinctive name, such as RAID10.   Choose Raid-Level RAID 10, which means the drives will be paired for mirroring, and the two pairs will be joined together and appear to Windows as one large drive.   Select the 4 drives on ports 2, 3, 4, and 5.  The volume will be created.  Windows will now see RAID10 as a single large drive.

Make the RAID volume into a single large filesystem under Windows

Now we go to the Windows Disk Manager to put a filesystem on this new volume RAID10.  If any of these 4 drives were previously used under Windows, Windows may have already mounted RAID10, but you *must disregard* this.  Windows is fooled and it is not a valid filesystem, and you will have corrupted data if you attempt to just use it.  Start Control Panel.  Double click Administrative Tools.  Double click Computer Management.   Left click Disk Management.  Expand the window so you can see everything.   If Windows is fooled and thinks there is a valid filesystem, RAID10 will appear in the top half of the window. But it will have some prior volume name which you may not recognize.   Out RAID10 disk will be appearing in the lower half of the window, but labeled as “Disk 1”, showing its size in GB.  We will focus on this list of Disks in the lower half of the screen.  The first entry is Disk 0, which is Healthy (System), and is our system disk.  Don’t touch it!  The second entry is Disk 1, and is our RAID10.  The size should make sense, and should be about equal to two drives added together.  For example if you used 500Gbyte drives, two drives added is 1000Gbyte, and subtracting some overhead will appear as about 931GB.

If Windows sees RAID10 as without a partition, then the Initialize and Convert Disk Wizard will automatically start (when Disk Management started above).  This is good.  (If Initialize and Convert Disk Wizard did not start, don’t worry, skip ahead to the next paragraph).  Click Next, and select the disk number which matches the label RAID10, in the window “Select disks to initialize”.  Then a second window offers “Select disks to convert”, do NOT select any disks in this view.  So we will Initialize one and Convert none.  Finish.   RAID10 now appears in the lower half as Basic and Online.

If Windows wrongly thinks RAID10 already has a partition, we will first destroy it.  In this case the Initialize and Convert Disk Wizard has not started automatically.  If you are not sure what to do, this step is safe to repeat.  Click on Disk1 in the lower half of the window, in the horizontal bar area (not on the Disk 1 label area).  Then right click and select Delete Partition.  Pause for a moment and look carefully that you have not selected Disk 0, which is our Windows system disk.  All data on this volume will be lost (we don’t have any) Yes.    RAID10 now appears in the lower half as Basic and Online, and the horizontal bar says Unallocated.

Now we put a partition on RAID10, which is basically information to Windows about the size of the disk.  Left click in the Disk 1 horizontal bar area of the lower half of the window, then right click and select New Partition.  The New Partition Wizard starts.  Next.  Select Primary partition.  Next.  Now the Partition size should be equal to the Maxium disk space, Next.   Select “Assign the following drive letter”, Next.   Select “Format this partition with the following settings”, and choose File system: NTFS, Allocation unit size: Default, and enter a volume name such as RAID10v.  Also check the “Perform a quick format” box.  We don’t need our drives formatted and this box means just create an empty filesystem.  Next, and Finish.  It will take Windows about 1 minute to do this, and then RAID10v will appear as a new line in the top half of the screen, showing FileSystem NTFS and Status: Healthy.   Out new 4-drive mirrored filesystem is ready to go!

Exit Computer Management.  Start MyComputer and you should see RAID10v.  Left click it, then right click Properties.  You should see mostly Free space. 

The Journey is half the fun

Unless of course you spent a lot of time fighting with Windows strange messages and errors.  If you made it this far, congratulations.  Along this path, I hope you took frequent breaks.  Windows needs time to cool down and so do you.  When one is tense, one doesn’t think properly and makes mistakes.  Mistakes are costly in terms of your time. This is why we use a tool like Norton Ghost, to permit quick recovery from mistakes.  Buying an extra drive is another good mitigation.  A spare drive allows you to try out a procedure before committing to it.

Ultimate vindication

For my motherboard I choose a quad core 2.67GHz CPU.  This really relieves one from having to wait for various Windows overhead functions, including virus scans.   Here is a photo of my final system, running Unreal Tournament III (with no frame drops), while a 2 core video compression runs in the background, and I am copying 1000 photo files over our home 1Gbit Ethernet, all at the same time:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Categories: Gaming, Multicore

Comments (2) Comments RSS Feed

By paulette on July 18th, 2008 at 1:07 pm
I think the discarded Mac is way too subtle for anyone to notice! But overall I'm with Sam - WAY too much time on your hands!

By Jaz Drive, Go Beyond Blog on July 19th, 2008 at 1:59 am
links from TechnoratiIn Part 2, I add the 3rd through 6th drives, to provide expanded storage to hold video source material. Windows Update Before proceeding, I encountered a broken aspect of Windows XP, based on my Repair operation earlier.  Repair partially disables the.. click here. I found this one on the day before yesterday, quite interesting: (more…)


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