Gigabyte GigaRaid??

[synapse02]

Will be receiving a Gigabyte board soon and i was curious if anybody has experience with the onboard raid controller or knows where there is info about it on the net.
I downloaded the instructions for the motherboard, and there was only generic info on the raid controller.
Im interested in the IDE portion, it appears to have 2 connectors on the motherboard suggesting it is a 4channel controoler?

If it is, is it usually possible to run 3 drives in raid 0?

thanks
jason

 

[yhelothar]

i believe you need either 2 or 4 drives to run raid 0...

 

[StraightPipe]

usually a normal RAID card wont do 3 drives in 0. but i think (not positive) that a hardware raid card will (the really expensive type, that never come integrated on mobos : ( )


99% of mobos have 2 IDE channels (read-4 drives)

 

[Pariah]

RAID 0 can be run with any # of drives above 1.

 

[ThatDumbGuy]

While this is true, I was under the understanding that running more than one hard drive on the same cable/channel while using RAID0 defeats the purpose of RAID0, i.e., Concurrent drive access. Only one device can use the channel at a time.

PS- To answer your question, the IDE raid on the 7N400 Pro 2 supports up to 4 devices (so yes, 2 connectors), if this helps.

 

[synapse02]

data has to be written to the drives simultaneously, correct.. we're starting to get more into the mechanics than I know about with that.

 

[synapse02]

Originally posted by: StraightPipe
usually a normal RAID card wont do 3 drives in 0. but i think (not positive) that a hardware raid card will (the really expensive type, that never come integrated on mobos : ( )


99% of mobos have 2 IDE channels (read-4 drives)

the asus SK8N only supports 2drives in a raid array.. If anybody is looking for one.. i'll make you a hell of a deal

 

[josedawg]

The Gigabyte boards actually support up to 6 devices. 4 on the regular IDE ports (2 on each, like most IDE controllers) and 2 on the GigaRAID IDE ports (1 on each). From my research (I almost went with a Gigabyte board on my new upgrade) but found out the GigaRAID is actually just a rebranded Promise IDE controller, which sucks beyond belief. I've heard countless horror stories on how slow/sucky it is. And no, it can't be fixed with a BIOS upgrade.

If you ordered the Gigabyte GA-7N400Pro2, good luck. If it's the regular Pro, good find The Pro2 was a step backwards in technology for Gigabyte, why they called it the Pro2 is beyond my knowledge. Many of the voltage/BIOS settings found in the regular Pro are not in the Pro2, as well as no Soundstorm.

As to my understanding on RAID 0, I believe it needs to be in pairs of 2, so no you can't do 3/5/7 drives. However, I'm not 100% on this.

 

[synapse02]

josedawg

What you are saying is not consistent with what i have read or what other ppl(thatdumbguy) have said. You stated that only one drive can be connected to each ide/raid port. The K8NNXP-940 supports raid0+1(i have read) so that would require four drives.
The asus SK8N that i am using now only has a single raid port, so both drives are connected to the same port with a single cable.
Seems we have a mixed census on whether drives can be added to a raid0 arry in odd numbers..

 

[Pariah]

Originally posted by: josedawg
The Gigabyte boards actually support up to 6 devices. 4 on the regular IDE ports (2 on each, like most IDE controllers) and 2 on the GigaRAID IDE ports (1 on each). From my research (I almost went with a Gigabyte board on my new upgrade) but found out the GigaRAID is actually just a rebranded Promise IDE controller, which sucks beyond belief. I've heard countless horror stories on how slow/sucky it is. And no, it can't be fixed with a BIOS upgrade.

If you ordered the Gigabyte GA-7N400Pro2, good luck. If it's the regular Pro, good find The Pro2 was a step backwards in technology for Gigabyte, why they called it the Pro2 is beyond my knowledge. Many of the voltage/BIOS settings found in the regular Pro are not in the Pro2, as well as no Soundstorm.

As to my understanding on RAID 0, I believe it needs to be in pairs of 2, so no you can't do 3/5/7 drives. However, I'm not 100% on this.

I looked at a few boards on Gigabyte's site, and all the boards with PATA RAID support RAID 0+1, so they have to support one than 1 drive on a channel. Obviously any SATA RAID support is only one drive per channel since that's all the SATA 1.0 spec supports. You do not need an even number of drives for RAID 0. 3 is a perfectly acceptable configuration on Gigabyte boards and any other RAID controller.

Also, it's a myth that 2 drives on the same PATA channel will seriously hurt RAID 0 performance. There may be a minor drop, but nothing you would ever notice.

 

[josedawg]

Ohhhh durrrrr. I'm an idiot. Sorry for the confusion. What I meant to say was it supports 4 drives in RAID, but I believe it only supports 2 drives in a non-RAID setup. I read that if you use optical drives on the IDE RAID ports, you could only use 1 per port, instead of 2 like standard IDE ports (up to 4 drives in 2 ports vs. 2 drives in 2 ports). I could be wrong and this fact can only pertain to optical drives. I have yet to hear of anyone have 2+ HD drives in the IDE RAID ports in a non-RAID setup. Will need more info on this.

I looked up RAID 0 and yes you guys are correct again. RAID 0 need not have pairs of drives, just a minimum of 2 drives. I wonder how striping occurs in 2+ drives then? Would it be quicker with 3 identical drives than 2 identical? I wonder....

 

[Pariah]

No, it still supports 4 hard drives in non-RAID mode. You never want to put non-hard drives on RAID ports. Most RAID cards don't support ATAPI drives at all. The Gigabyte RAID ports do, but there's no reason to put optical drives on them, just use the non-raid port.

Would it be quicker with 3 identical drives than 2 identical? I wonder....

Yes, that's sort of the point, the more drives you add, the faster it gets.

 

[josedawg]

Thanks for the clear up. Now my brain is working into overtime....

HOORAY FOR MIDTERMS! </sarcasm>