Quick IDE Raid Question?

[lastig21]

My motherboard has onboard raid via the hpt370 chipset. If I were to set up a Raid O would make it any difference how I set the drives up? For example, would having a harddrive on ide3 on its own cable and a harddrive on ide4 on its own cable, perform better than having both drives on ide3 sharing the ata cable?

 

[Yossarian]

For RAID I believe you must have each HD on its own cable.

 

[MichaelD]

I'm not sure I understand your question, but I'll offer some insight. Setting up an IDE RAID 0 array, with two identical drives on the HPT controller will benchmark about 33% faster than a single IDE drive in your system. But benchmarks are just bragging rights; it also has some real-world benefits.

As far as "setting the drives up" goes; if you are raiding two drives on the HPT controller, you:

1. Set them both as Master.
2. Put one drive on each controller, by itself (i.e. one drive per connector on the mobo.
3. Go into the HPT bios (Hit CTRL/H during bios boot process; you'll see the prompt for it on-screen)
4. Once in the bios it's pretty intuitive as it tells you what to hit to set up a RAID 0 (striping) array.
5. Use the 64kb stripe size
6. Install your OS

I hope this helps. If you have any questions, I'd be happy to try to help out.

Remember this; with a Striping Array, if one drive fails, you lose everything. Either accept the fact that you'll have to backup your important data, or be prepared to deal with starting from scratch.

Many may say that IDE RAID 0 isn't worth the hassle, but IMHO they are wrong. It's all about what YOU want, not them. Games will load in 1/2 the time, levels will load in 1/2 the time, etc. RAID0 does nothing for onscreen performance, ie. FPS. HOpe this helps.

 

[LostHiWay]

You can have a RAID 0 with 2 drives on the same cable. I would recommend you put them on a seperate channel though if your only going to have 2 drives. The hpt370 can Raid 0 up to 4 drives which you would have to have 2 drives on each cable