Confused about IDE ports on Asus P5GDC-V Deluxe

[kranky]

In an earlier thread asking for motherboard advice, I asked if I could use 4 IDE devices on an Asus P5GDC-V Deluxe motherboard. The devices are two hard drives, a CD-R and a DVD player. This board has:

Intel® ICH6R South Bridge:
- *1 x UltraDMA 100/66/33
- *4 x Serial ATA with IntelR Matrix Storage Technology with RAID 0, 1 support
ITE® IDE RAID controller:
- * 2 x UltraDMA 133/100/66 with JBOD, RAID 0, 1, 0+1 support

And I was advised:

Yes you can attach your IDE drives. Put the CD-R and DVD on the Southbridge IDE channel. Put the 2 hard drives on the ITE IDE controller. Set the ITE controller as your boot device in the bios and configure which drive to boot from in the ITE menu at boot.

So while I wait for my mobo to arrive, I downloaded the manual to get up to speed on what I will need to do. But reading the manual, I can't figure out how to relate the advice above to the actual motherboard.

The board has connectors PRI_IDE1, PRI_RAID1 and SEC_RAID1 (I'm not using SATA). And it has two flavors of RAID (ITE and Intel) which adds to my confusion even though I'm not using RAID. So I am assuming that PRI_IDE1 is the Southbridge channel and PRI_RAID1 and PRI_RAID2 are on the ITE controller. (The manual doesn't really specify) so I will put CD and DVD on PRI_IDE1 and my two hard drives on PRI_RAID1.

According to the manual, the BIOS boot options just show a list of devices attached. Nothing I could find mentions selecting a particular controller (Southbridge or ITE) to boot from. And the only mention of configuring RAID talks about the Intel RAID setup - nothing about the ITE.

I suppose it could be this easy:
1. Attach IDE devices to both controllers, and they will all be listed in the BIOS when setting boot priority.
2. Ignore anything about RAID since I'm not using it.

Could that be right? Have I missed something? Do I need to configure the RAID software in some fashion even though I'm not using RAID, or can I ignore it totally?

 

[joelslaw]

i think what they meant is that you can put your 2 hdds on the raid ide's, then put your optical drives on the non-raid ide. Then select a raid drive as the boot device. you are acctually using the raid ports so you'll have to use pri or sec raid, depending on which one you want to boot from.

however i was under the impression thet you can't just use the raid ports as extra ide's but that you have to use them together as one raid drive, but the fact that you can choose pri or sec as the boot device makes me think im wrong. you may just have to play with it and see.

 

[kranky]

Actually, all the BIOS says about boot device (and this is going by the manual) is that a list of drives is available to choose from. Doesn't say how the system decides what is on the list. On one hand, I have to believe you can use the RAID controller as regular IDE drives because I can't figure all that many people want to use RAID. But it's not clear, that's for sure.

I guess you're right - I'll have to wait and see. I hate figuring stuff out while trying to put it together, I like to have a plan worked out ahead of time since it makes things go so much faster and smoother.

Thanks for the reply.

 

[joelslaw]

yeah, i know what you mean!

let me know how this works out, knowing about the raid thing might come in handy in the future.