I was so confident that the guy who built my box at the local computer shop knew it all, now that's a little shaken.
Athlon 900 TBird, ABIT KT7-RAID, 256, 98se. I got a second hard drive so I could use the RAID, so I now have 2 IBM DeskStar 75GXP 30GB. And I got a CDROM and a Plextor 8/4/32 CDRW. On the board, there are 4 IDE controllers -- 1 & 2 are "regular", 3 & 4 are RAID. When it was built, he put the HD on #1 , with the CDRW as slave. CDROM is on #2. 3 & 4 are open. When I got the 2nd HD, I looked inside and saw the setup and was puzzled. The ABIT manual says they strongly urge not to put a CD-ROM on the same IDE channel as a HD, for performance reasons, depending on the CDROM performance. And I thought that 3 & 4 were the hotshot connectors, so the HD would have gone there. I called him, and he said this was his first RAID motherboard installation, and he hadn't read the whole manual word for word. He thought he had seen 1 & 2 as the RAID connectors, and he completely missed the fine print about not putting a CD with a HD.
I can't complain a lot about the performance the way he set it up. It's so fast compared to what I had (200 Pentium Pro). But now I have this second drive, and one more cable, to make a total of three cables available, and 2 open connectors -- the 3 and 4 RAID connectors. I don't know much about these things, but I think I can do the install myself, having read enough on websites. I can install my own RAM and peripherals, just never installed a HD before.
So the quiz is -- with 4 connectors, 4 devices, and 3 cables, what goes where? I can of course just get a 4th cable and each device would get its own connector and cable, and I expect the HD's would get the RAID connectors and the CD's would get 1 & 2.
The manual says not to connect a HD and CDROM together. Does that apply to a CDRW as well?
For now, would I put the HD's on one cable in one of the RAIDs, as master and slave? I plan to use the 2nd HD for installing a Linux partition, and for massive backup capability. Would backups benefit from individual channels for the HD's? If each HD gets a cable and a channel, that leaves the CD's having to go piggy-back. Somewhere I read that a CDROM and CDRW should not go together, it would make copying really slow.
Anyhow, that's my puzzle and what I've thought of it so far. Any gurus out there?
Thanks a lot
F
Athlon 900 TBird, ABIT KT7-RAID, 256, 98se. I got a second hard drive so I could use the RAID, so I now have 2 IBM DeskStar 75GXP 30GB. And I got a CDROM and a Plextor 8/4/32 CDRW. On the board, there are 4 IDE controllers -- 1 & 2 are "regular", 3 & 4 are RAID. When it was built, he put the HD on #1 , with the CDRW as slave. CDROM is on #2. 3 & 4 are open. When I got the 2nd HD, I looked inside and saw the setup and was puzzled. The ABIT manual says they strongly urge not to put a CD-ROM on the same IDE channel as a HD, for performance reasons, depending on the CDROM performance. And I thought that 3 & 4 were the hotshot connectors, so the HD would have gone there. I called him, and he said this was his first RAID motherboard installation, and he hadn't read the whole manual word for word. He thought he had seen 1 & 2 as the RAID connectors, and he completely missed the fine print about not putting a CD with a HD.
I can't complain a lot about the performance the way he set it up. It's so fast compared to what I had (200 Pentium Pro). But now I have this second drive, and one more cable, to make a total of three cables available, and 2 open connectors -- the 3 and 4 RAID connectors. I don't know much about these things, but I think I can do the install myself, having read enough on websites. I can install my own RAM and peripherals, just never installed a HD before.
So the quiz is -- with 4 connectors, 4 devices, and 3 cables, what goes where? I can of course just get a 4th cable and each device would get its own connector and cable, and I expect the HD's would get the RAID connectors and the CD's would get 1 & 2.
The manual says not to connect a HD and CDROM together. Does that apply to a CDRW as well?
For now, would I put the HD's on one cable in one of the RAIDs, as master and slave? I plan to use the 2nd HD for installing a Linux partition, and for massive backup capability. Would backups benefit from individual channels for the HD's? If each HD gets a cable and a channel, that leaves the CD's having to go piggy-back. Somewhere I read that a CDROM and CDRW should not go together, it would make copying really slow.
Anyhow, that's my puzzle and what I've thought of it so far. Any gurus out there?
Thanks a lot
F
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