Will, You can survive without the battery, but that means there is no power in case of a failure to write the cache data tot he drives, which can cause issues.  On a side note, what is the driver and  firmware for the Perc 5/i? If it is out of date in can cause false errors as well. Which may be the situation.  Also, if you decide in the future to replace it the part number is DFJRV.
Hi. About to install a 2nd hand PE2950 which came with a PERC 5/i Integrated RAID card. The PERC cache battery is no more. Not even detected. It has 3 137gb SAS drives, which I've used to create a RAID5 272Gb disc, split into 2 partitions - 25 Gb for Windows 2003 Srv R2 SP2, and the rest for a data partition. It's for a small business of 6 people and they'll just use it for file sharing, and weekly client>server backups, before the server completes its nightly usb>tape drive backup. Nothing else, not even printing. So it automatically set itself to write-through, which I know impacts disk performance. My question is, for such a small level of use, am I going to notice this?  Also, I've seen that sometimes you can force a battery re-learn - but in this case it's not even detected. It's there though.... Thanks all,
PERC 5/i Integrated battery dead - does it matter for very small business?