FakeRAID RAID1 - What's going on here?

[evilsatan]

I have an HP ML110 G5 ProLiant server that I am getting ready for a job, I inserted two new 1TB drives, configured RAID1 in the pre-boot environment using the HP embedded RAID controller and it shows as a single logical array pre-boot. When installing Server 2008 Foundation it was seen as a single disk but now the OS is installed if I go to Computer it shows the disks individually. Each disk has the windows files on it so I guess the installation was correctly put on the array but I created a test txt file on the C:\ and this was not mirrored onto the E:\. Now I am concerned that the RAID1 array is not functioning correctly and there is no disk tolerance for mechanical failures.

Any assistance appreciated, I followed the same setup on various ProLiant Microservers and it worked on all of them but they used server 2008 r2.

Cheers

EDIT: It is an Adaptec Serial ATA HostRAID apparently. Device Manager shows all drivers are installed but perhaps something is preventing the OS from seeing the Array correctly so it is just booting off of one drive and showing the other as a slave?

Device manager lists the RAID controller as "Intel Desktop/Workstation/Server Express Chipset SATA RAID Controller" Hardware ID: "PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_2822&SUBSYS_31F4103C&REV_02" Driver 13.0.1.1000 26/02/2014 (Probably installed by my DriverUpdater USB).

[evilsatan]

Started from scratch again and it appears to be recognised correctly before updating the drivers so I have only updated the network drivers etc. this time.

[Over Carl]

Headaches like this are why I refuse to use fake raid. Another classic I saw a few times was a drive in a RAID1 mirror failing, but rather than the controller mark the drive as failed/offline, it just keeps retrying the bad drive.

Those kind of headaches are bad enough in a home/test environment, forget a proper work/production environment.

[evilsatan]

Fortunately this server is being used to host a DOS based program and database as I can install an LPT card for a dot matrix printer. The database will be backed up using cloud backup so RAID here is just for some form of local redundancy, cloud backups will be the main form of backup. It will then store client PC backups which are non-critical and it may be used as a file server but all files will be backed up to the cloud too.

[evilsatan]

HP were sneaky, I knew there were server 2008 drivers on their site previously for this server as that is the OS it shipped with and google results said so too but on their site only server 2003 drivers were available. Had to use google cached pages to get to the 2008 versions.

New problem, the server won't turn on when this PCI parallel card is installed, probably because it isn't certified so I am trying to find info on certified cards but not having any luck atm.