Raid 0 on A7V133

[akiraxtc]

I have a question about the Raid Setup on the A7V133 board...
Right now i have 2 non-identical harddrives about to be put on the Raid controller on my asus, they are:
IBM Deskstar 75 GXP 30 GB, udma 100 supported
Maxtor Diamondmax 80 GB, udma 100 supported
Will this setup work? Do i have to re-format my harddrive after i set up the raid support? Right now i have Windows ME installed on the deskstar as the primary OS.

Thanks

 

[BlueScreenVW]

If you use those for RAID 0 you'll only get 2x30=60 GB space (that is, you loose 50 gig). For RAID 1 you get 1x30 GB (loose 80 gig). That is, you only get the size of the smallest hdd. In your situation (if you already own both drives) I'd either not raid at all, or preferentially buy another IBM 30 GB 75 GXP. Then you could use RAID 0 with the two IBM drives, and connect the Maxtor on a non-raid controller (this is important - do not let it slow down one of the other drives as a slave). If you do this you get 2x30 gig really fast RAID 0 to have OS and games/apps on, and can use the somewhat slower Maxtor drive to store mp3s and stuff. Just my 2 cents worth (don't you say that in the USA?).

 

[cbuchach]

If you are going to do a RAID 0 setup with those two drives, only the first 30 gig's of the 80 GB drive will be recognized. Also, when you create the array all the data on the disks will be lost as the drives have to be set up in a stripping arrangement. So you will have to re-partition and format.

 

[Technonut]

You would just be asking for problems with that setup. To have RAID to function properly, you should have the same type/speed hard drives.

If you plan on RAID0 on the A7V133, have 2 of the same type hard drives. Before you set up your array, backup all of your stuff from your existing hard drive that you want to keep. Read the manual, make sure that your jumpers are set for RAID, and install your hard drives as instructed. You will enter the Promise Fast Track Lite BIOS on boot up. Follow the instructions to enter the BIOS, and read the manual on how you want to set it up.

You will have to go to Microsoft's site to download, and overwrite the FDISK.exe on your normal system boot disk to the latest FDISK. (I do not have the link handy at the moment) That will allow you to FDISK the large drive array properly. Then format the array. It will say it is formatting an incorrect amount, but in the end, it will show the proper drive space. Install your OS, and then assuming you are using 98SE, check in device manager, and look for a yellow ? mark under SCSI controllers. Have your ASUS CD in, select the SCSI controller to update the driver, and select "have disk" Browse to the ASUS CD, and under the Promise folder, select RAID0 for 98SE, and install the driver.

Just follow the instructions in the ASUS manual, It explains it fairly well.

 

[akiraxtc]

Hmm thanks guys for all your input... i think i'll stick with the current UDMA 100 configuration... setting it on RAID is too much trouble i think.
Right now i have 1 x 30 Gigs, 1 x 80 gigs, 1 x 25 Gigs and none of them are identical drives... and i'll have to wait a little bit more before getting another HDD (All of them are almost full, filled by Anime movies )
And it would a pain in the ass to re-partition the HDD and reformat
By the way, how fast is the RAID 0 compared to the UDMA 100? I've tried to parse a 250 megs MPEG file in VirtualDub and find it to be around 15 seconds (UDMA 100 of course). Anyone tried the same thing with the RAID 0 setup?

 

[BlueScreenVW]

The speed increase for me in Sisoft Sandra HDD bench was about 75% when I got another hdd and put them in RAID. From 25000 to 44000 sisoft hdd points.

Addition: If you move large files from one hdd to another often, maybe ordinary ATA100 is better than RAID? At least in Win98 the "copy file" action could be a lot better between two partitions on the same hdd/RAID setup.