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raid question

H

HiME

Senior member
i'm willing to add a controller card to my computer, how will my computer detect it in bios

the thing is i'll either play with it by:

1. running raid 0 with 3 old 20GB - 40GB (5400rpm) hard drive, i can get them with a good price and put my OS and applications on it, worth it?

2. need it to install bigger hard drives with no raid, my motherboard currently uses a 40GB had drive and i don't know what's the max volume will it take

motherboard; pineTL-za31
cpu: P3 450
bios: award modular v4.51PG 07/27.99


another question is in raid 0, does it work like this ? HD1 20GB + HD 2 40GB = 60GB

just to note that i fully understand the risks of raid 0
 
Not highly recommended to use old hdd in a RAID (either Striping or Spanning) for OS HDD. You can use it for temporary file or storage file as long as you have a back up. As for the max hdd size you can use, just get the best bang for the buck. This is usually the 200 or 250 GB size. Just make sure you have a bios that can recognize the entire size. If not, you will need a bios utility to recognize the entire hdd size which is free and downloadable from the hdd maker. Lastly, you can also use the raid controller as an addtional IDE port for all the extra hdd's you have lying around. As for recognizing, depending on your OS it could just be as simple as installing the driver or having it recogized during reboot.
 
With RAID 0, all drives must be the same size or the area used on each drive is the size of the smallest. so 20GB + 20GB = 40GB raid 0 disk. The OS sees it as a single 40GB disk.

If you use JBOD you could have 20GB + 40GB = 60GB, but you would not have the speed benefit of striping.
 
If you're getting a bigger HDD anyway, you can safely use up to a 120GB (the barrier is 137GB, IIRC), and any new 120GB will be fast faster than different-sized 5400 RPMs in RAID, except in pure transfer speed.

If you want a big drive (>120GB), then you can get a PCI ATA controller that does 48-bit addressing, and use that, instead of the onboard ATA controller. Make sure it does big drives and can boot from them (the cheap Koutech and SUNIX at Newegg both claim to). I don't know how well Win9x deals with these kinds of things and big drives, but Linux, NT4, Win2k, and WinXP tend to work very well.

For general speed, getting a very new larger drive would be best (with a fair HDD and enough RAM, even old PII and PIIIs make fine desktops). If you just need a bit more storage, a 120GB will do well, and should be no hassle. The main thing about a smaller drive is that you can typically spend the <$20 or so for a controller card, and end up with at or better than the same GB/$ as the smaller HDDs (that is, a 250GB+card vs 120GB and none--absoulte cost varies a good bit, but not much per GB of space).
 
thanks for the reply,

i'm only worried if those controller cards will get recognized by the motherboard's bios, for the os i'll just have to make a clean install so there shouldn't be any problems

if i don't want JBOD i just need them to be the same size right?


http://canadacomputers.com/index.php?do=ShowProdList&cmd=pl&id=IO.570

Best Connection PCI IDE ATA133 Raid Controller (SIL0680 Chipset)
Bytecc Serial ATA 150 PCI RAID Card with Cable (2 Ports)

which one should i get or i should look for a promise controller card, please suggest me some controller cards, i'm a canadian
 
anyone had exprience any problems with bios recognizing the HD while installing a controller card?

anything that i should look at while purchasing one?
 
Poke around in your BIOS. For something of that vintage, you will be most likely looking for an option to boot from SCSI. Or it may say add-in card.

You are thinking correctly, make sure first you have the boot option you need. I don't think you will have a problem. I feel what you need will be available. But make sure first.

If needed, post back with a list of boot options.
 
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