KR7A-Raid...should I or shouldn't I???

[Tullphan]

I've got the motherboard, i've got an IBM Deskstar 60gb & a Maxtor 60gb, & i've got the cables. Now I need to decide if I should set it up for raid or not. I don't do any serious gaming or number crunching. I've heard that alot of people have had troubles setting up raid on the Abit or that the Abit didn't like the raid. If I should set it up, should it be 0 or 1? If not, should I use the raid connectors as extras for hard drives? Should I set the hard drives up individually?
Thanks in advance.

 

[Tullphan]

Anyone???

 

[JSSheridan]

I'm not sure how RAID works on ABIT's. As for what type of RAID setup you should use, RAID 0 or RAID 1, that depends on what goals you want the RAID to achieve. Below are a pair of links I found on AT.

The first is a brief summary of RAID.

What are the different RAID levels and what are they used for?

This one is an in-depth overview of several different RAID setups.

IDE RAID Comparison

Hope this helps. Good luck. Peace.

 

[Insidious]

I think most of the people that have trouble with Raid on ABit MoBos are attempting to use a SCSI card and don't disable the on-board Highpoint Raid controller in BIOS. Or even worse, they try to put drives on both.

If you are using a SCSI card, an ABit with onboard raid probably isn't the best choice in MoBo. Otherwise, it's great

I think you might have some difficulty with different brands of HDs making up the array though. I have always understood that it is best to have HDs of the same size and brand.


Mode 0 (Striping) lets you move around large files faster (hence, faster start-up of OS and Apps.)

Mode 1 (mirroring) lets you have a real-time back-up of all your data in case an HD fails (mechanically/electrically). (won't help if failure is due to bad software and/or set-up because the mistakes will be mirrored on each drive)

It doesn't really sound like you are doing work that would show major changes in performance with a Raid Array, but it is kind of fun to hobby around with..........

GO FER IT!

note: I use the additional IDE connectors (as non-raid) to allow each drive to be the master (when possible) and keep ATAPI devices off a connector servicing an HD (at all costs)