IDE Raid card on an Intel 430VX MB

[abtm]

I am looking to breath new life into some of my older computers (no flames on junking them please, a P200 makes a nice file server assuming you have enough HD space). One of the bigest limmits I am running into right now is the 8GB HD barrier that the intel 430VX chipset has. I am therefore looking at an IDE card (mayber IDE RAID). Will these work with the 430VX? Would I be able to boot from it? Would there be any other gotchas with doing this?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Noriaki]

<< I am therefore looking at an IDE card (mayber IDE RAID). Will these work with the 430VX? Would I be able to boot from it? Would there be any other gotchas with doing this? >>

Yes, yes, not really. Not sure a PCI IDE card would let you get over 8GB in a single partition though, I think that's a Motherboard BIOS limitation...

 

[Budman]

Yes to all, an external pci raid card has it's own onboard bios so they will not be any 8 gig limit there.

The motherboard will treat &amp; see it as a scsi card so there isnt problem booting from it or going over 8gigs since the onboard bios takes care of that.

 

[Sukhoi]

Isn't software RAID processor usage fairly high? I'm not sure how well it would work on a P200.

 

[abtm]

I would hope the card would take care of the raid etc and therefore would not hit the processor. Worst case, if it does I would still have larger HDs even if I can not use raid. *SHRUG* I am still better off with the card than without it in that case.

Thanks for the info.

 

[Zach]

I got some good responces in my post:

Linux software RAID on a P200!

If Linux software RAID is okay, the card's 'software' RAID will be fine too I'd assume.

 

[abtm]

Got the card and installed it. System had no problems seeing the 40GB drive I had attached to it. 2 caveates: 1) no drivers for win95 avail 98, me, nt, 2k only and 2) if you want to boot from a hard drive on the card, no bootable devices can be on the on-board IDE controllers. But other than that, I like it.