Question about HD and RAID when overclocking

[Oops]

I've seen many good overclocking boards from Abit and Epox with AMD761 and KT266A chipset that will do 166+ fsb with no problems (8k7a, 8kha, kr7a, etc). But those boards only have a 1/4 divider, which means running at fsb over 166 mhz means you hard disks will be at 42+ mhz, will these cause data corruption on the hard drives? Especially some are even reaching 180+ mhz. Is it the drive they use are overclockable too?

Also, I am interested in buying a motherboard with raid. I have 2 40gig Maxtor, and 2 80gig Maxtor. If I buy one of the motherboards with raid, can I run all 4 on raid 0? Like 2 pairs of raid 0? Or the controller will only do raid 0+1 for 4 drives. Because I read the MSI boards will only take 2 drives with raid, so I want to know if this is true for all raid controllers out there, or just particular ones.

 

[boyRacer]

If you're only interested in RAID 0 and you want to run all four as such... your 80GB drives will be used as a 40GB like your two smaller drives. You can definitely run all 4 as RAID 0 but you're going to lose at least 80GB of usable space. Some HD's puke at 37MHz some don't until 42 and above... I say don't put anything important in your RAID array if you're planning to overclock... but HD's of late seem to be able to handle the out of spec PCI though. I'm only on 35MHz.

 

[Oops]

So the raid controllers cannot run 2 pairs of raid 0? Since the two raid ide can hold up to 4 drives, why can't it run 2 40gig in 1 raid ide, and 2 80 gig on the 2nd raid ide. So I will see a 80 gig, and a 160 gig when running two raids. Is it possible? Or I can only run all 4 drives as 1 large drive like you said, which means my 2 80 gig will drop to 2 40 gig.

 

[boyRacer]

As far as I know I don't think you can have two pairs of RAID 0 arrays with only one RAID controller. I know I can't do it on my Promise controller... or never saw the option to do so.

 

[Mikki]

I think it MIGHT be possible. My raid bios will list different arrays. For instance, during some testing with a single drive, I went to setup my raid again and my bios showed two arrays, one with each drive (and listed drives). I'm not sure about that, and not sure how it'd work, but there you go. My question is why would you want to? 4 drives in a raid 0 would probably yield results that would justify having it (I have as yet to justify raid in my system period...:frown: ).

As far as overclocking, I'd look into a raid board with a pci lock. HTH

 

[SupermanCK]

i believe you can do two separate raid-0 array on one controller...at least mine can i believe...have not try tho...

 

[boyRacer]

I tried downloading the KT7A manual and well... i can't see the setup options... the pictures are rather blurry... maybe you should post this is in the general hardware forum... someone should know for sure.

 

[Oops]

Thank you guys for all your responses. I'll try to post this in the forum. BTW, which motherboards has PCI bus lock? I am looking at boards along the Epox, Abit, Asus line which offers raid and ddr and good overclocking features.