Hoping for a miracle: ASUS Sabertooth 990FX + 3ware 9650SE-4LPML

[PhilBeyondDriven]

Hi all,

I'm putting together a Frankenstein home server, some new components and some older. Parts relevant to my question:

CPU: AMD FX-6300
Mobo: ASUS Sabertooth 990FX R2
HDD: 4x Hitachi 0F12470 Ultrastar 7K3000 (2 TB each)

I want to use a 3ware 9650SE-4LPML that's new in box, and has been sitting in my tech vault forever.

OS is still undecided, but the three I'm most seriously considering are: Win7 Ultimate x64, Amachi, or FreeNAS.

Do I have a snowball's chance in hell of getting that RAID controller to work on the new hardware?

Thanks!

 

[Tradesman1]

Check and see if they have newer drivers for it, may have trouble with OS support and might with the SATA III 2GB drives, this is an older RAID card

 

[PhilBeyondDriven]

Thanks for the reply!

Provided that I can find the drivers (a VERY cursory Google says it may be possible), would the RAID controller just make the SATA III drives run at SATA II speeds? Or is this a "That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works" type of situation? I'm way more familiar with consumer tech than enterprise gear like that RAID card...

 

[Tradesman1]

The IIIs are backward compatible - the size bothers me, as in will the controller even recognize them which is where the drivers would play in

 

[ZENprime]

Thanks for the reply!

Provided that I can find the drivers (a VERY cursory Google says it may be possible), would the RAID controller just make the SATA III drives run at SATA II speeds? Or is this a "That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works" type of situation? I'm way more familiar with consumer tech than enterprise gear like that RAID card...

Yea the controller is a sata II , not a sata III they are backward compatible .

It will work providing that you have drivers ..

Why do you want to use an old RAID controller while the motherboard bios already supports RAID out of the box ?

 

[PhilBeyondDriven]

Yea the controller is a sata II , not a sata III they are backward compatible .

It will work providing that you have drivers ..

Why do you want to use an old RAID controller while the motherboard bios already supports RAID out of the box ?

Because I've had abysmal luck using motherboard-based RAID controllers (two DFI boards , one Biostar, and one EVGA). SATA ports gone to hell, RAID controllers failing, drive failures too numerous to blame on bad luck.

FWIW, I don't abuse the computer physically during build or use. I build it carefully and move it to its permanent home gently. Once it's where it'll live forever, I pop the side off every couple of months to give it the air duster treatment. That's it. Barring a hardware failure, nothing inside the case ever moves.

Additionally, I like that the RAID card has its own CPU and memory. That way, my system's resources can be doing useful things like transcoding video, Photoshop CS, and editing audio and video files. I will also be utilizing Windows' built-in drive mirroring for my system disk, and that can eat up some resources too.

ETA: VMware is also a possibility.

That said, I am totally open to suggestion about any/all of this. If you know a better way, or a cool idea to share - please do!