K8V SE Deluxe and IDE RAID

[Fat Boy]

Hello all. I'm new to anything RAID and had a few questions for the
group. Thanks in advance for any insight and suggestions.

I'm setting up an new computer with Windows XP Pro. I have bought the
K8V SE Deluxe and am wanting learn about setting up a RAID 1 array. I
have two 80gb Western Digital drives currently on the normal IDE
connection. I have two additional 30gb WD drives that I'd like to set
up in a RAID 1 using the southbridge connection. Which controller
should I use to do this? The Promise controller or the VT8237
controller. Or will neither of these work with normal IDE drives?

If I can't set up these drives as a RAID array, can I at least connect
them to the southbridge and just use them as normal everyday drives?

Thanks for the help. Like I said, I'm really a newbie to anything
RAID.

Fat Boy

 

[Paul]

Hello all. I'm new to anything RAID and had a few questions for the
group. Thanks in advance for any insight and suggestions.

I'm setting up an new computer with Windows XP Pro. I have bought the
K8V SE Deluxe and am wanting learn about setting up a RAID 1 array. I
have two 80gb Western Digital drives currently on the normal IDE
connection. I have two additional 30gb WD drives that I'd like to set
up in a RAID 1 using the southbridge connection. Which controller
should I use to do this? The Promise controller or the VT8237
controller. Or will neither of these work with normal IDE drives?

If I can't set up these drives as a RAID array, can I at least connect
them to the southbridge and just use them as normal everyday drives?

Thanks for the help. Like I said, I'm really a newbie to anything
RAID.

Fat Boy

From the manual:

South Bridge supports
- 2 x Ultra ATA 133 connectors <-- four ordinary drivers on
primary and secondary connectors
- 2 x Serial ATA with RAID 0, RAID 1 <--- two SATA drives or two PATA
drives with SATA converters
Promise ® PDC20378 RAID controller
- 1 x UltraDMA133 supports two hard drives <--- Two PATA possible
- 2 x Serial ATA connectors
- RAID 0, RAID 1 and RAID 0+1 configurations

To RAID on the Promise and get decent performance, you would want
two SATA drives, or one SATA and one PATA. Reason for this is, you
don't really want to RAID two drives on the same PATA cable, although
that configuration is supported. If you don't own any PATA to SATA
converters, then you can put the two drives on the UltraDMA connector
and use it just fine. It just may not benchmark as high as an
alternate configuation.

HTH,
Paul

 

[Fat Boy]

From the manual:

South Bridge supports
- 2 x Ultra ATA 133 connectors <-- four ordinary drivers on
primary and secondary connectors

First, thank you for the reply Paul.

Looks like what I'm gonna do then is just hook up the two extra drives
to the south bridge. Since I'm not going to use a RAID, is there
anything special that I should do - driver wise for the south bridge
to work? Should the two drives on the south bridge be jumpered like
my two main drives - which are master, slave? Or should I jumper them
slave, slave. Doing that would make my jumpers: master 80gb, slave
80gb, then move to the south bridge with: slave 30gb, slave 30gb.
Thanks for the jumper help.

Another thing, are Serial ATA drives a lot faster then my standard IDE
drives? Might it be worth the extra money (I'm assuming) to get two
serial drives to hook up to the south bridge?

Thanks again for the time. Take care.

Fat Boy.

 

[Paul]

First, thank you for the reply Paul.

Looks like what I'm gonna do then is just hook up the two extra drives
to the south bridge. Since I'm not going to use a RAID, is there
anything special that I should do - driver wise for the south bridge
to work? Should the two drives on the south bridge be jumpered like
my two main drives - which are master, slave? Or should I jumper them
slave, slave. Doing that would make my jumpers: master 80gb, slave
80gb, then move to the south bridge with: slave 30gb, slave 30gb.
Thanks for the jumper help.

Another thing, are Serial ATA drives a lot faster then my standard IDE
drives? Might it be worth the extra money (I'm assuming) to get two
serial drives to hook up to the south bridge?

Thanks again for the time. Take care.

Fat Boy.

Jumpering is necessary, any time two drives live on one IDE
cable. One drive is jumpered master, and the other one slave.
If you have only one drive on an IDE cable, it is jumpered
master or master/single drive, depending on the drive maker
and their terminology. Using cable select for both drives
on a cable, lets the drives figure this out for themselves,
assuming you are using an 80wire/40pin cable of recent
manufacture.

There is not usually anything special about the IDE interfaces
on a standard Southbridge. Many of them will run with the
default MS IDE driver, because otherwise, how would you install
an MS OS and then do the chipset drivers ? A certain level of
compatibility is necessary - otherwise you would need to
press "F6" early in the install, and find any special drivers
needed for an interface. A lot of the IDE drivers offered with
motherboards, are simply caching drivers that use some of system
memory to buffer the data, making the driver look faster than the
MS one. The MS one is the most compatible and if you use Nero
or similar software, compatibility can be important.

Whether you buy a SATA drive right now, depends more on compatibility
than performance. If you own no computing equipment, and this
is your first motherboard, then you won't have a lot of PATA
equipment sitting around. All future computers will be heavy into
SATA, so buying a SATA now would be a safe investment. I've got a
lot of PATA drives here, so for now, new ones are PATA, to make
it easy to move them between computers (not all the computers
have SATA, but they all have PATA).

SATA drives right now are not typically "native" implementations.
They might have a bridge on the disk controller PCB, and this can
limit the peak transfer rate to 100MB/sec. So you won't necessarily
see a big difference. The PCI bus also has a 100MB/sec practical
limit, so if the chip you use is connected to PCI, it cannot go
any faster than that anyway. If makes the SATA transfer rate
thing, a thing of the future. One year from now, there will be
more motherboards with good SATA implementations, and _maybe_
by then, we might even see some native (unbridged) disk drives.
Disk drive manufacturers are very slow at evolving their
controllers, so don't expect any miracles.

HTH,
Paul