Quick Question Regarding the IWill SIDE RAID 100

[canadianpsycho]

Looking to pick up an IDE controller card, but for only 1 HDD.

I'm wondering if anyone out there can confirm the SIDE RAID 100 will boot and run only 1 disk on the controller card? Iwill doesn't have any manuals on their site, and 4 reviews I read do not mention wether or not the card will just boot and run with only 1 HDD attached.

Thanks a lot.

 

[zephyrprime]

It should. If anything holds you back it would be your MB's bios not your IDE card.

 

[Jeff H]

As zephyrprime said, it should. The SIDE RAID 100 has a BIOS onboard, which is the key to boot capability. And, as zephyrprime said, if there's an issue, it will likely be w/ your mobo, not the card.

FWIW I bought a Promise ATA133 card, thinking when I built my system last spring I'd need/want one. I ended up buying a mobo w/ onboard RAID so I tried the Promise card in my daughter's system (Soyo 6BA+III). Bottom line is the card wouldn't play nice on this board. First boot would be OK, but subsequent boots resulted in a Windows Protection Error. I just installed that card in my neighbor's Asus CUSL2-C board and it's running like a champ.

I'm sure success on my neighbor's board is related to the relative age of the two boards. It might also have something to do w/ the installation routines I used. On my daughter's mobo I hooked the boot drive up to the card, let Win98SE detect it, then installed the drivers. On my neighbor's system I installed the card - w/o hooking the boot drive to it. Win98SE detected the card, I installed the drivers, then shut down the system and switched the boot drive from the onboard IDE controller to the Promise controller.

 

[mooseAndSquirrel]

I don't know (but disks are pretty cheap, so would suggest you just get 2!). I have this card with a RAID0 array (which I do not boot from, but I could).

In looking at the manual and boot screens, I only see the following choices:
- create raid
- delete raid
- duplicate mirror disk
- create spare disk
- remove spare disk
- set drive mode
- select boot disk

the raid is 0, 1 or 0+1 and you can also span (JBOD). each one of these modes requires 2 disks.

Maybe you just ignore the raid and select the boot disk. You have 2 IDE channels on the card, primary and secondary, with master and slave each, so it does seem pretty standard. You instruct your BIOS to boot SCSI and it'll pick the first "SCSI" card on the PCI bus (the RAID cards show up as SCSI adapters).

But these days 40GB hard drives are way cheap, so I still think you should go for 2 (I have 2x120's with 8MB cache in RAID0; wasn't cheap but is very, very fast)

 

[Jeff H]

mooseAndSquirrel, you're on the right track w/ the - select boot disk option for a single disk. Connect the single drive to the primary channel, select it in the BIOS as the boot disk and you're good to go.