2XATA 100 on Asus A7V

[Qvark]

I have an IBM Deskstar 30 GB and plans to buy another (45GB Deskstar).

There are two ATA100 connectors on the motherboard. Should i buy another ATA 100 cable and connect it to the secondary ATA100 connector, or should i save the money and connect harddisk 2 to the primary ATA100 cable?.

Or..

Any experiences with RAID?. Is it possible on my system, and how.

[otheos]

First, RAID is possible but requires hardware modification on the A7V. If you are still interested....

Second, if you use the same cable to slave the second drive to the first you lose performance because the bus can be only accessed by one drive at a time. So one of the two will wait for the other to finish becore it does anything. So if you copy from disk to disk say, one disk reads, stops the other disk writes, stops etc etc
ATA100/66 cables are less than $10 and performance difference is noticeable. Go for it.

[Qvark]

Thanks Otheos http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/smile.gif

I will definetely but one more cable.

What kind of modifications are required for RAID. Some sort of controller?

[otheos]

well you can certainly buy an add-on PCI controller with RAID for $30 (if you do make sure you get a Promise based controller rather than a HotRod). But you can do a bit of soldering on the motherboard (add a couple of resistors) and make the onboard Promise chip work as BIOS (it has the capability but it is conected on the board so that it is disabled).

[Qvark]

Tnx! I´m off investigating what a controller costs here in Denmark.

Soldering......nope - i´ve got ten thumbs.