Raid for me?

[Dannigan123]

Trying to find out if RAID is for me! I am upgrading my M/B to eithor a Asus A7v133 or Abit k7ta-raid. My (2nd) main priority, that nobody has been able to answer is, that I need the board to support 6 devices. (3
ATA 100 HDD's & 3 CDROMs.) Apparantly the Abit can support 8 Devices using the Raid 0 & 1, but I dont need the m/board to mirror data, more so that I can run all my devices (without the need to get a seperate card to support the extra devices!)Do I need to use identical drives on eithor of these boards? Can anybody shed some light on this as I dont know anybody using these boards, or for this purpose, or if you have any suggestions..

[Antimatter]

The A7V133 promise controller can be set to either ATA100 or RAID 0. In other words it's good for 8 completely different IDE devices. I haven't tried the Abit so don't know about the settings but I assume it's the same.

[Darren Wilson]

The Highpoint controller can be set to run in a RAID configuration or as Standard ATA100 IDE controllers.

Little tip:- Don't run your CD-ROM's off the Highpoint controller. For some reason, quite a few CD-ROM drives don't like being run off these. Use it just for your Hard disks for optimum performance.

[DualP3Guy]

Ok this is what you want to know. RAID can be used two different ways. Mirroring and Stripping. Mirroring means you use a second disk with the same data as one of the others. Stripping, which i think you want, will make two physical drives look like one to the OS. Example: I have two HDD's in my hand, lets say two 10GB drives. I install them as stripping in my RAID slots. Now I boot the OS and go to My Computer. Now what shoud you see? You should see ONE 20GB drive. That way you can put 2 of your HDD's in your RAID and use the open IDE slots for the cdrom's and the last open IDE for the other HDD. Hope that helps. I can explain this better with more time. If you need more help contact me.

[Dannigan123]

Antimatter
Advanced Tech


Member # 12486


posted April 25, 2001 02:40 AM
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The A7V133 promise controller can be set to either ATA100 or RAID 0. In other words it's good for 8 completely different IDE devices. I haven't tried the Abit so don't know about the settings but I assume it's the same.

Sorry about the multiple posts! (Im new at this!) How is the A7v133 good for 8 Devices? From my understanding, IDE0 = 2 Devices + IDE1 = 2 Devices + Raid 0 = 2 Devices = 6 Devices?!?! Sorry for the ignorance, but I havent actually seen/used one of these boards before...
So the A7V133 would be a better choice than the Abit K7ta Raid Board? Thanks for the advice folks!

[Antimatter]

The Promise controller on the A7V133 has dual IDE in ATA100 mode(primary & secondary) the same as the standard onboard IDE controller. That's how you get 8 devices max.

[Dannigan123]

Antimatter! Your the MAN, thanx for the advice! I wouldve been bugging for ages still....!

[Antimatter]

[BarnesConsult]

Originally posted by DualP3Guy:
Stripping, which i think you want, will make two physical drives look like one to the OS. Example: I have two HDD's in my hand, lets say two 10GB drives. I install them as stripping in my RAID slots. Now I boot the OS and go to My Computer. Now what shoud you see? You should see ONE 20GB drive. That way you can put 2 of your HDD's in your RAID and use the open IDE slots for the cdrom's and the last open IDE for the other HDD. Hope that helps. I can explain this better with more time. If you need more help contact me.

I think that setup would be called Spanning.


Striping is where the data is split and saved partly on one drive and partly on another. This gives increased performance, but I believe the stripe set can only be as large as the smallest hard drive. In the case of a 10GB and a 5GB drive, the stripe set would give you a total of 10GB (5GB on the smaller drive and 5GB on the larger with the raminder wasted).

Spanning uses all of the first drive before using the second drive. There is no performance increase, but with 10GB and 5GB drives, you would have 15GB total.

To use either striping or spanning, I believe you would have to backup the drives, format them, set up the stripe, then restore the data back to the new drive. I don't think the controller can create a stripe on multiple drives with existing data.

If you just connect your drives individually, you will have more drive letters used in windows and will have access to each of the drives separately.