A8V and SATA HD setup

[Otm Shank]

I'm putting together a new system with an Asus A8V motherboard and a 250 GB
Maxtor SATA hard drive. Initially, I intend to use just one hard drive, but
in the future I will add an identical hard drive for RAID 1. I have no
experience with SATA drives or RAID. I will be using Windows XP Pro.

Can anyone walk me through the procedure? Per the A8V manual, I understand
that I can add a new drive later to create RAID 1. It is my understanding
that everything on my first drive will be left alone when adding the second
drive for RAID 1.

The MB has Serial ATA connectors and RAID Serial ATA connectors. My gut
tells me to connect the single drive to the RAID connectors and set the BIOS
for a single drive configuration. Is my gut right?

Thanks in advance.

OS

 

[Bob Knowlden]

The A8V has two sets of SATA connectors. One set is intrinsic to the VIA
VT8237, the second is an add-on Promise controller.

Both are RAID capable. However, if I understand the manual correctly, the
Promise controller has the capability to add a second drive in RAID 1 with
an existing drive without losing data, but the VIA controller does not. (It
supports RAID 0 or 1, but I see no mention of a way to go to RAID 1 from a
single SATA disk configuration without wiping the existing disk.) I haven't
donne this, though.

In my own system, I'm using the VIA controller with a pair of SATA drives in
RAID 0. I've disabled the Promise controller in the BIOS, as I'm not using
it at the moment. (Saves a few seconds at boot.)

HTH.

Bob Knowlden

Address may be scrambled. Replace nkbob with bobkn.