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DFI NFII Ultra - IDE/RAID question

S

sykopath79

Senior member
I will be receiving a DFI NFII Ultra Lanparty board from Newegg.com in a couple days and I have a question regarding the drive connections. The board has the following drive connectors:

- 1 SATA connector (which I presume means only 1 drive and not two in master/slave like normal IDE),
- the standard primary & secondary IDE channels on the north half of the board
- two more channels for IDE RAID on the south half of the board

What I'm planning to do is use a SATA HDD for the primary drive (OSes and apps) and use one or two secondary HDDs for file storage and backup purposes. However, I understand that using the SATA channel disables the primary IDE channel on this board, and I need the secondary IDE channel for my two optical drives.

So the question is: do the other IDE channels on the south half of the board have to be used only in a RAID configuration and nothing else? I don't have the drives I would need to do RAID and I would rather have more discrete drives rather than a RAID array at this point. Is it possible to use the south IDE channels as normal IDE channels without doing RAID, to connect one or two more drives as distinct drives?
 
Unfortunetly like most onboard ide raid controller that i've seen, they can only be used in raid mode.
 
You should be able to set the RAID BIOS to JBOD (just a bunch of drives). This won't create an arrary and the raid controller will function like a normal IDE controller.

(I know this will work with Highpoint RAID controllers...I'm not sure which one the DFI uses.)
 
Heh... if I'd paid more attention as I was reading the article I wouldn't have had to start this thread...

Straight from Anand's review of the NFII Ultra Lanparty:

"The IDE drive support for this board is truly exceptional, since the HighPoint controller also allows single hard drives to be driven by the RAID chip with no special formatting required."

Looks like I should have nothing to worry about.
 
I think that a lot of onboard RAID controllers allow the use of only one drive. For instance, I recently posted about some trouble I was having with my IDE channels filled up with three optical drives and one hard drive. Well, my MSI 845 Ultra-ARU motherboard also has a Promise FastTrak133 RAID controller on it. There were two unused ATA133 IDE channels on the board. I just had to install the RAID drivers into my WindowsXP Installation, enable the RAID controller in my BIOS, then attach my HDD to the RAID connection. Upon booting, the RAID controller thought that my solitary HDD was a RAID 0+1 Array that was fully functional. As a result, I now have my only HDD on the RAID controller and my opticals on the primary and secondary IDE controller. Although bootup is about five seconds slower now, the performance of my HDD is insanely fast on the ATA133 channel and there's no conflict between my HDD and DVD-Burner.

So I think that a lot of onboard RAID controllers will allow you to use the RAID connectors as normal IDE connectors provided you install the RAID drivers. 😀
 
yep, you can use the RAID IDE channel as a non-RAID channel for IDE devices...just make sure that you tell the BIOS to NOT boot from the RAID channels/devices!

and you can have 8hdd's if you wanted them =)
 
Only thing the newer Highpointy RAID chipset doesn't support any longer in single config are Optical Drives...should be fine
 
W3RD! Got my new mobo installed and up and running; all I had to do was install the Highpoint driver in Windows and voila - two extra IDE channels. It's handling them just fine as normal IDE channels by default with no additional fooling around.

It did take me a while to find where to enable Serial ATA in the BIOS though...

So far I'm very impressed with this board. I just moved over my current CPU and RAM (1.33 GHz T-bird, 2x256 MB DDR266 RAM) and already the combination Serial ATA and dual-channel memory makes the system feel generally quicker. Can't wait to watch it scream once I can afford to drop in a Barton and some DDR400 Corsair TwinX...
 
rgr that syko =)

Buffalo/TwinMOS RAM with the BH/CH chips on them are excellent for the board, the TWINX works excellent, as does Golden Dragon and OCZ duals.

Barton 2500's oc very nice, as do the really hot XP1700 "B" cores =)

Travis
 
Will S-ATA hardrives work in RAID striping just the same as regular ata drives if the motherboard has onboard sata support...I am getting the ASUS p4800 865pe, and am unsure whether sata drives would be ideal for raid speed for gaming.DO the sata drives run any cooler or behave diffrently and how is the cabling like.?
 
440bx: RAID striping will be controlled by the SATA's RAID controller (or it will have built in RAID support) most likely. This is true when running RAID on a DFI I875 board.
 
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