Should I put my 2 HDs (non-RAID) on my RAID slots?

[KnickNut3]

Hey. I have a KT7A-RAID motherboard. I had it like this:

Primary Master: 40 GB HD
Primary Slave: None
Secondary Master: DVD-ROM
Secondary Slave: CD-RW

I just installed a new 80 GB HD. I put it as the primary master, and bumped my 40 gigger down to primary slave.

I have two RAID slots on my mobo empty. I planned on using them, but never did. Would I get a noticable performance increase if I put the two HDs in separate RAID slots with separate ribbons? I tried doing this quickly yesterday, but couldn't get it to boot, even with the RAID controllers on and the two boards sensed. It wanted the main HD in primary master.

Thanks for the comments/suggestions.

 

[Sukhoi]

Did you change the boot order if you need to?

 

[KnickNut3]

Oh yeah... forgot about that. Yeah, that would do it, probably. Is it worth my time next time I delve in there?

 

[Sukhoi]

If you access both HDDs at the same time a lot it would probably help having them on separate channels.

 

[hudster]

yeah, the separate channel thing is definitely an advantage if you're reading-writing between the two (backups, video editing, etc).

also, are either of your harddrives ATA100? because the raid channels are ATA100, while the 'regular' IDE channels are ATA66 I believe (well, at least I'm pretty sure that's the way it is on my KT7-RAID mobo, so I imagine your KT7A-RAID would be similar...check your mobo manual about that)

-hudster

 

[KnickNut3]

Yeah. My primary's a brand new ATA133, and my other's an ATA100.

Anyone else confirm this? I can't tell from the manual or site.

 

[Sukhoi]

You might be able to set them up as single drive RAID arrays..I don't know for sure though.

 

[KnickNut3]

After my HD crashed (see other thread) doing this, I realized in my bootup that it recognizes both my HDs as ATA100. Guess it's not ATA66 on the KT7A. I think I'm staying no matter what if I ever get it working again... unless someone has some really good, failproof step by step suggestions.

 

[jrini]

With four EIDE channels available, you will definitely get better performance if you put each of your four EIDE devices on separate channels. I have tried various combinations, my ABIT mainboard even allows me to run all four of my drives as slaves, can not measure any performance differences as a function of which drive is where as long as there is one drive per channel.