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2 SATA RAID 0 drives + 2 SATA RAID 0 drives, 2 SATA DVD drives

A

alkolkin

Member
I have an ASUS A8N SLI Deluxe motherboard.
It has the capability of connecting 4 SATA drives via the Southbridge chiset and connecting 4 SATA drives via the Silicon Image controller.

I have two 74Gb Raptor drives that I want to hook in Raid 0 and I have two 34 GB Raptor drives that I also want to hook up as Raid 0.

I have two Plextor SATA double layer DVD drives that I want to hook up, not as Raid of course.


Questions:
------------------
Which drive should be the boot drive, the 34GB or the 75GB?
To which controller should the boot drive be connected?
To which controller should the other drive be connected?
To which controller or controllers should the two DVD drives be connected?
Which will be Master drives and which slaves?

Your help would be appreciated!
 
1. It doesn't matter which drive (array) is the boot drive. usually people use raptors as boot drives for speed reasons but all your drives are raptors so that's your choice.

2. I suppose what you really want to know is one controller faster than the other? Theoretically the nForce controller as it supports 3Gb/s and NCQ. In addition, the nForce controller is integrated into the chipset while the SI controller is on the PCI bus. Having said that, the Raptors are still SATA 1.0 and run at 1.5Gb/s.

3. You can connect the the 2nd array to either of the controllers. I don't believe that there's any performance penalty in having two or four devices on the same controller.

4. As regards the DVD drives, see above.

5. There is no master/slave concept in SATA - each cable has only one device attached.

If it was me, I'd probably go for the boot array on the nForce controller (SATA-1 and 2) with the DVD drives on SATA-3 and 4. I'd then put the 2nd array on the SI controller (SATA-RAID 1 and 2).

Just one note of caution. You are planning on running RAID-0 arrays for performance reasons - but be aware that this means that should either of the drives fail you will lose all the data on that array....... raid-0 has no redundancy and an increased probability of data loss (statistically speaking) and you are planning dual raid-0 arrays. You have been warned!





 
I have a SCSI-II Dat drive that can accomodate 80 GB. I am also paranoid so I have Norton Antiirus and SpySweeper, a hardware firewall, and a good software one as well. I use Retrospect for the backup software, so I can create a boot image of the exisiting hard drive(s). I probably do not need 200GB backup, just 80 will do.

I have always been very good about backing up every day and it has saved my butt more than once!

Good suggestion.
 
I have posted this question on many different sites. All agree that the Southbridge is the fastest SATA and that there is no Master/Slave relationship in SATA.

However for everything else there is no concensus. Many point out that (1) the maxtor drives do not support the faster speed of the new Southbridge so that it does not matter to which controller they are attached, (2) it MAY make it easier to manage if each Raid drive is on a separate controller, and (3) that the Maxtor 75 GB is much faster so it should be the boot drive.

It sounds like this would be a good setup to test for more definitive analysis.
 
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