PC-DL Deluxe

[Mike Lombardi]

I have just completed building a new workstation with the follownig specs:

Asus PC-DL Deluxe
2 Intel Xeon 2.66
2 GB PC2700 RAM
2 Maxtor 80 GB SATA drives
1 PNY Quadro FX 1100
1 Plextor DVD burner
1 Liteon DVD ROM

I want to set up the hard drives in a striped RAID. I see that there is a
Promise and and Intel based way of doing this on this motherboard. Can you
suggest the proper BIOS and RAID settings for me? What is the difference
between the settings? What SATA ports do I use?

Also, I would like to use a couple P ATA drives that I already have for
storage. Can I do so? This system has a DVD burner and a DVD player as
well.

 

[Leythos]

I have just completed building a new workstation with the follownig specs:

Asus PC-DL Deluxe
2 Intel Xeon 2.66
2 GB PC2700 RAM
2 Maxtor 80 GB SATA drives
1 PNY Quadro FX 1100
1 Plextor DVD burner
1 Liteon DVD ROM

I want to set up the hard drives in a striped RAID. I see that there is a
Promise and and Intel based way of doing this on this motherboard. Can you
suggest the proper BIOS and RAID settings for me? What is the difference
between the settings? What SATA ports do I use?

Also, I would like to use a couple P ATA drives that I already have for
storage. Can I do so? This system has a DVD burner and a DVD player as
well.

First the RAID - You do know that in a RAID 0 (Stripe) that if you loose
either drive you loose EVERYTHING?

The Promise RAID controller is the one you want to use - it's easy to
setup RAID 1 or RAID 0 from the POST - if you don't have any drives
connected to the Promise connectors (you need one on each) then you
won't see the prompt. You also have to set the bios to enable RAID for
the promise controller (it's under advanced something, not where you
select IDE Type and then Combined, Enhanced, etc...).

After you set that up, you can setup the IDE / SATA mode - I use
Enhanced so that I could use both IDE and SATA devices (up to 6 of them
total).

I did a SATA 2 x 250GB RAID 1 (mirror) and it took a LONG time to
complete the mirror, but it's worked great since.

The only problem I've had with this board, and it wasn't the board, was
that I was shipped two Xeon's that were different stepping. Once they
sent the same step it worked perfectly.

If you connect the 4 IDE devices, storage, DVD, then you can only use
the Promise RAID controller SATA ports - you will also have to set the
BIOS to boot from the RAID/SATA or it will default to booting from the
IDE drives.

Let us know how it works - I love mine.

 

[Jens Baumann]

The Promise RAID controller is the one you want to use - it's easy to
setup RAID 1 or RAID 0 from the POST - if you don't have any drives
connected to the Promise connectors (you need one on each) then you
won't see the prompt. You also have to set the bios to enable RAID for
the promise controller (it's under advanced something, not where you
select IDE Type and then Combined, Enhanced, etc...).

I would recommend the Intel SATA Raid controller, because it offers
higher performance (it does not use the PCI bottleneck and reviews e.g.
by German magazine c't showed the lowest CPU usage and highest
throughput of all tested SATA Raid controllers).

 

[Leythos]

I would recommend the Intel SATA Raid controller, because it offers
higher performance (it does not use the PCI bottleneck and reviews e.g.
by German magazine c't showed the lowest CPU usage and highest
throughput of all tested SATA Raid controllers).

Interesting, that's something I had not seen. I will have to check that
out.

Thanks for the update.

 

[Julian Mummery]

It all depends what you want out of your system. If you go down the
Intel route you will not be able to overclock (by changing the CPU
clock rate) your system via the BIOS. This feature will be disabled.

I would plug your SATA drives into the SATA_Raid1 and SATA_Raid2
connectors and then you will be able to overclock the mobo.

The bottleneck mentioned is negligable and you will not notice the
differnce, unless you are a benchmark freak

Regards
Julian