sata port question

[jeffw2767602]

hey all. i have what may be sort of a dumb question about sata channels. i have a gigabyte board with 8 sata ports, 6 on the ich9r and 2 on the gigabyte jmicron controller thing. i want to set up multiple raid arrays and i was wondering if i could, for example, set up 2 raid arrays on the ich9r.

also i was wondering if anyone could tell me if it makes your system faster if you have a small drive for just the swap file? and if so, does it have to be on a different controller to actually make things run faster.

what im wanting to do is set p 2x250 seagate 7200.10s for the os, 2x1tb seagate 7200.11s for data, and one cheap 80gb seagate for the swap file. ideally i would like to keep the swap file on the gigabyte controller. so yea i probably made this simple question much longer than it had to be so...yea...lol. thanks

 

[Tarrant64]

You only need a swap drive for a linux(unix) system.

As long as the raid arrays are on the same controller you should be fine. As long as your motherboard supports that.

The next thing we should probably go over is what kind of RAID is it you are planning to use? 0, 1, 0+1? Have you used RAID before?

 

[imported_Eriol]

Originally posted by: Tarrant64
You only need a swap drive for a linux(unix) system.

Not exactly true. It's even in the "Vista performance tweaks" thread (or whatever the title is, it's stickied) over on the OS sub-forum here to put your pagefile (swap file, same thing) onto a different physical drive to improve performance. So it's there, it just doesn't require its own partition like the Linux/Unix one does.

And on the same controller is still probably fine. Sure 100% separation is always preferable, but as long as it's off the physical drive, it should be fine. It's not like the old days of IDE where two drives on the same cable weren't as good as on other ones. Sure there'll be a difference between controllers, but a very very minor one.