PC-DL Deluxe Questions

[Banjo Nut]

I will be setting up a new PC-DL Deluxe next week. I have 2 new WD 36GB
SATA 10,000rpm drives to use for RAID 0 ... and 1 Maxtor 250GB SATA 7200rpm
drive (and a Highpoint RocketRaid404 controller card if needed). This mobo
seems to have two RAID controller options and I am not familiar with this.

I want to install Windows 2K Pro, but the downloaded Installation Manual on
page 2-23 has a note that "The Serial ATA RAID feature (RAID 0) is available
ONLY if you are using Windows XP." I could install Windows XP, but would
prefer Windows 2000 Pro.

Questions:
1) Will Windows 2000 Pro work with 2 SATA drives configured forRAID 0 work
on this mobo?

2) Are there any tricky installation points concerning the "Promise
PDC20378 chipset" vs. the "Intel ICH5R chipset"?


Since this PC will primarily be used to render and encode video, I will be
installing both Intel 3.06GHz Xeon processors and 2GB of PC2700 Kensington
dual-ddr memory. This will be replacing my exising ASUS mobo with 1.8GHz
single processor that had 1GB ram and 1 no-RAID HDD.

Any other helpful tips in advance of installation would be appreciated.

BanjoNut

 

[Anthrax442]

Questions:
1) Will Windows 2000 Pro work with 2 SATA drives configured forRAID 0 work
on this mobo?

Yes, but you should just stick to the Promise Controller. The Intel
controller has given me grief, even when using the most current XP Pro.
You'll definitely have to use the Promise controller, as the Intel
controller is NOT supported under any other OS other than XP.

2) Are there any tricky installation points concerning the "Promise
PDC20378 chipset" vs. the "Intel ICH5R chipset"?

No, just make sure the Promise controller is set to "Raid" in the bios and
not "SATA" or whatever the other option is. It took me about five minutes
to figure out why the hell it wasn't giving me the prompt to enter the raid
bios, even though it recognized the hard drives just fine. Again, the Intel
controller isn't worth messing with in this setup.

Since this PC will primarily be used to render and encode video, I will be
installing both Intel 3.06GHz Xeon processors and 2GB of PC2700 Kensington
dual-ddr memory. This will be replacing my exising ASUS mobo with 1.8GHz
single processor that had 1GB ram and 1 no-RAID HDD.

Geez, you're going from the proverbial outhouse to the penthouse as far as
video encoding goes. That's a pretty kickass (read: Pricey) system. Good
luck!