RAID question?

[radio1_mike]

In a few weeks I will be putting together a system upgrade for a friend.

He would prefer to have 4 separate IDE ports; so each of his 4 IDE devices (2HD, 1CD/RW, 1DVD) can all be masters on their own channel.

I said it should not be a problem, we could just get a RAID board and everything will be fine.

Well, I've come to wonder about that. Since I don't actually have a RAID board myself.

My question is: Can you treat the 2 extra IDE ports in a RAID mobo (say, an ABIT KT7-RAID) as IDE3 and IDE4, without having a RAID setup for the hard drives?

Thanks.

ps. He's kind of adamant about this point. Though I've tried to say it's not strictly necessary. If it were up to me, I'd pick one of the new SiS-735 based motherboards.

[j moy]

I have no clue about any RAID... but... what you can try to do is get the motherboard you want without RAID and add a Promise card and etc... the Maxtor card has the ATA/100 for 50$ at Best Buy.

[Bovon]

After much reading and asking questions at several forums, I decided to not go the raid route. A few people were successfull in using the raid features as ide chanels..others were not so lucky and fought it tooth and toenail. There was a thread over at amdmb forum that ran into quite a few posts over a month or so.

I finally decided to go the non raid route and get a Promise IDE card. Personally, I think this is the better solution.

In my particular setup, I wanted the Iwill KK266 board. This board in the raid version uses an AMI raid controller, and apparently had more problems with an IDE set up than the Abit KT7A with the Highpoint raid controller, but even the Abit users were having ide problems as well.

Concerning the Promise PCI controllers, you can get the Ultra 66 at eBay for about $10 bucks...I have bought two, and will get a couple more for future systems. Most benchmarks show little if any benefits between a 66 and a 100 anyway. I have both a 66 and a 100 and ran both by Sandra with almost the same results. (A 30 gig WD udma 100 benched at 2780 with the ata 66 and 2860 with the ata 100)

[radio1_mike]

Thanks guys.

Yeah. Hmmm.

My friend is presently using a Promise ATA-66 card I gave him. He doesn't like the performance, he says it hangs sometimes. And previously, he could not get his DVD-ROM and CD-RW to work together on the same IDE channel.

He has a Dell P3-500 with 512MB from a few years back. It looks like the 512MB is PC66 and his native IDE channel are ATA-33. I think his problems are Dell's mobo architecture and the PC66 memory.

I'll be bumping him up to a Athlon 1.4GHz and 512 PC133. The only question is the motherboard.

Does anyone have any other experiences? Positive or negative?

[j moy]

They say not to use CD-ROMS or DVD-ROMS on the Promise card...

[Bovon]

Yep j moy I have read the same...put the cd/dvd/zip drives on the mainboard controllers apparently works better.

By the way, I can't mention the place here, but if someone needs a deal in an Ultra 66 Promise pci card, and would like to look at the sale, there is a certain place with an Item # of 1265117941 thats worth a peek.

BTW mike...73, DE K4YAW

[alphageek]

Yes, you can used the RAID pots to run a hard drive out of an array. I did so for a while with a singal drive and my KT7-RAID.

I've got a Asus A7V now, and with it you can set some jumpers so the RAID card runs as and Ultra 100 controler.

[newbie~wan]

I could be wrong, and correct me if I am, but I thought athlons only used ddr memory?
Their fsb being 100 or 133 double piped.

[radio1_mike]

Newbie~Wan:
Athlons can be run with PC100 or PC133 if your mobo/chipset is capable. That's why the ECS K7S5A will be neat-- you can run SDR/DDR.


Bovon:
I did not know that. I'll keep that in mind. What bands are you active on?
73 de N1RLD

[Bovon]

Hi Mike, I'm not active at the present. Hurricane a couple of years ago took down my antennas, and I don't climb trees anymore.

When active, I am usually found on 3970 or 3915. I did do a little 40 mobile when traveling, and some 20 m from a diapole. All of the antennas are down, and I don't have any hams in this area to help out with..

cul...73, Bovon

[SPEEDO]

Hi

I have been using the KT7A-Raid motherboard since January.
If you enable raid and put your hard drive on IDE channel 3 and set the boot option to ATA100 you can run one hard drive.
You can put your CD's on IDE channels 1 & 2
Of course you will need a UDMA 100 hard drive.

SPEEDO