Dell sas 6/iR raid 5 questions

[MasterOSkillio]

I am a little new to raid that isn't done from a motherboard chip set and a little confused about the card I have. I won an auction on ebay for a Dell raid card. the auction said Dell perc 6/iR, I have the card here, and when I put it in my machine and it boots the Bios displays Dell sas 6 host bus adapter, is that different then a perc card?

I have 8 sata hard drives, 5 2tb and 3 1tb. I want to set up two arrays from this card both in raid 5. One array will be all the 1tb disks and one will be all the 2tb disks. When i go into the cards bios I only have the options I have are for either raid 1 or raid 0, and there is no option for raid 5. I am not sure what I am missing but isn't this card supposed to support raid 5?

I don't know too much about it, but should I be flashing this dell Bios to an lsi one? is there some way to get raid 5 working without a flash?


For reference the Bios listed is MPT Bios- 6.22.03.00 (2008.08.06) and I am running windows home server 2011, which is based off of server 2008. I can run raid 5 from inside windows from the computer management console, but I believe that is software raid, and therefore not what I am looking for.

Any help would be appreciated.

 

[upright_animal]

It sounds like you got the SAS card, not the PERC. You may want to follow up with your Ebay seller if it was listed as a PERC.

The SAS is a cheaper alternative to the PERC, and as such has fewer features and capabilities.

SAS 6/ir card:
- Supports RAID 0 and 1 only.
- Lacks a backup battery (so if power fails suddenly to your server, you would lose any data that was not yet been written to the disks).
- No on-board memory
- Supports a maximum 10 physical disks.

PERC 6/ir:
- Supports RAID 0,1,5,6,10,50 and 60
- Has a backup battery and on-board cache memory.
- Supports up to 32 disks.

I do not know if you can enable RAID 5 by flashing LSI firmware, but I doubt it.
As for the Windows, RAID, yes, it is software RAID.