Asus A7V266-E - can RAID be used for 8 devices?

[Fuddam]

heyo

Am trying to decide between (mighty expensive) Asus board and (even more expensive :Q) Abit KR7A.

Know the Abit allows 8 IDE devices to be used NON-Raid, but can't find info on same for the Asus - any ideas?

Can get the Asus within couple of days, here in the UK, but Abit only arriving in mid Dec from what I hear, so trying to break the deadlock.

Going to be using mobo chiefly for video editing - multiple video cards etc.

cheers

Fuddam
mail me if poss

 

[Bozo Galora]

uh yes, but with caveats:

The IDE RAID solution on the Soyo Dragon Plus motherboard is provided by the Promise 20265R chip. This is the most commonly used chipset for IDE RAID on today?s motherboards, but there are a few different ways in which they work on those boards. My preferred way is for the RAID bios to allow the user to enable RAID on the IDE3 & 4 ports or to allow to be used merely as extra ATA/100 ports and having no RAID options on at all. Fortunately, the Soyo K7V Dragon Plus uses this kind of Promise bios. Some other motherboard manufacturers have chosen to use the FastTrak bios?, which do NOT allow the user to simply add extra IDE devices to the IDE3 & IDE4 channels. There are several work arounds for this including setting up single drive RAID arrays or using a modified bios, none of which I can 100% guarantee. Potential Dragon Plus purchasers will be glad to know their board is on the better side of this debate.

http://www.amdmb.com/article-display.php?ArticleID=137&PageID=3

ASUS A7V266E:

Promise UATA 100 / RAID

The on-board Promise PDC20265R controller can be used in either UATA 100 or RAID 0,1 mode. The default is set via jumper to ATA 100, if the additional channels are used for RAID, the jumper needs to be switched to short pins 2-3. Unfortunately, there is no possibility to completely disable the controller which causes search for devices on every boot-up and is kind of a nuisance.

 

[NelsonMuntz]

My understanding is that almost all of the onboard RAID solutions can have RAID either enabled or disabled depending on your desire. If you have RAID disabled, then you can connect up to eight IDE devices in whatever combinations you want. If you have RAID enabled, then four of the eight devices would be on RAID channels and should be hard drives of some kind while the other four can be any IDE devices of your choosing.

 

[Bozo Galora]

nope, used to be that way, no more.
for example, an Aopen AX37+ would take another hard drive if configured as single raid drive, but
under no condtion recognize a CDROM or CDR.
If you tried to setup CDR/CDROM as Master/Master to fool RAID, it just gives cant configure message.
Thats with or without the RAID drivers/ with or without the RAID disabled by jumper.
The only thing you gain by disabling is no boot screen for RAID

TRUST ME