Raid 5 Sata with an Asus K8N board?

[Brandonlh3]

Well, I am debating on going ahead and getting three more Seagate 200GB SATA hard drives to go with the other two. My mobo supports 6 raid drives. However, 4 of the SATA slots are NVIDIA chipsets and then it has two more SILICON chipset SATA connections at the top of the board.

I was hoping someone has had experience running 5 hard drives on two different controllers/chipsets? I appreciate it!

By the way, here is the system I have built:

Koolance water-cooled
Asus K8N Mobo
64-bit AMD 3200
2 GB Corsair LED RAM
Two 200GB Seagate HDs
Two DVD burners (8x and 16X)
520W Black Light Aspire PSU
and of course 6 black lights and 4 LED fans
Very Beautiful Computer

[Midknyte]

isn't it 4 sata drives on the SI controller and 2 on the nvidia chipset?

http://usa.asus.com/products/mb/sock...d/overview.htm

Dual RAID
The nForce3 250Gb chipset incorporated two Serial ATA and two parallel connectors with RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 0+1 and JBOD functions while the Silicon Image controller provides another four Serial ATA connectors for RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 10, RAID 5, and JBOD functions. The K8N-E Deluxe is the ideal solution to enhance hard disk performance and data back up protection without the cost of add-on cards.

Look like you would only be able to run 4 drives in RAID5 on the SI controller. It doesn't specifically say that you can run all 6 in one array.

Win2k and 2k3 server have software RAID5, if you really need to use more than 4 drives. however, I've never used it to span multiple controllers. You might run into problems with that.

[Brandonlh3]

Ok, I appreciate the advice. I couldn't find anyone that has done it so I didn't know if it could be done. I really need this terabyte because I have almost used up my 400GB with my video editing. I guess I will have to buy a couple of 300GB drives to get there but Seagate doesn't make them that large.

What brands do you think would be optimal for this setup? Hitachi? Maxtor?
I used to use Western Digital but it seems that Seagate is so much better. Other than that, I haven't used any of the others.

Brandon

[Midknyte]

The hitachis seem to be the best right now. You could also look into the new Maxtors with 16MB cache.