P4PE Experts - Single drive on RAID controller?

[Jeff H]

Guys,

I'm close to building a system for a friend, and leaning heavily toward the Asus P4PE/R/L/SATA mobo. My only question is this: can one run a single drive off the Promise onboard IDE RAID controller? I'd like to run the HD off the Promise controller, a DVD off the onboard IDE primary master, and a CD-RW off the IDE secondary master. Are than any issues you know of hooking the HD to the Promise controller as a single drive? FWIW OS will be Win98SE, drive a Seagate Barracuda IV 40GB.

 

[Mikki]

You just create an array with one drive, works a treat-->there's no real advantage to splitting your drives up tho....

 

[Jeff H]

Mikki, thanks for the reply. FWIW I'm curious as to why you say there's no advantage to splitting the drives on separate channels. What I've read is if you're doing tasks such as CD copying, ripping, etc. it's better to have the source and destination (optical) drives on separate channels. That's the way I'm currently set up on my system and I've yet to have a problem w/ optical drive functions and/or performance.

 

[Mikki]

Not so much anymore, it used to be a big deal a while ago. I did a bunch testing of hard drive configs and such, and along with others here that did the same thing, we found there was really no advantage. Not trying to talk you out of it, just if it's a big concern for ya, don't worry about it. HTH