What's the best arrangement for HD's on an on-mobo RAID controller?

[CTMorseJr]

I'm putting a computer together for my wife's business machine with the following specs:

Iwill KK266-R
Tbird 1.2ghz 133mhz FSB
512 mb Crucial cl2 PC133
2-Maxtor 30 gb 7200 rpm HD's
Hercules MX200
Linksys 10/100 nic
Kenwood 52 TrueX
Phillips 4/4/32 CD-RW
CDI full-tower case (w/8-case fans)
PC Power & Cooling Turbo-Cool 350 watt PS

This is the first Iwill board I've ever purchased (after years of Abit, Asus, & MSI) and I'm extremely impressed with everything. The packaging is by far the best I've ever seen for a mobo, oversized jumpers for fat bastards like me with big fingers, cables with pull tabs for ease of removal (like in the good ole days), etc...etc. My only complaint (which finally brings me to my question) is that there doesn't seem to be any reference on how to connect the HD's to the RAID controller. I'm planning on striping (RAID 0) and my question is this: should both HD's be on the same RAID channel (or do they in fact have to be?) as master/slave, or on seperate channels as master/master, or does it even matter? Any help would sincerly be appreciated.

 

[chainbolt]

The best for RAID 0 is always 2 masters!

Something else:
Sometines the on-board Raid controllers are LITE versions of the full-fledged PCI RAID controler cards, and allow only a 2 HDD RAID set-up. Of course, even in this case, you can connect 4 HDD (2master + 2 slaves) but they cannot arranged as RAID array then. They just run as usual "unraided" ATA 66 or ATA 100 drives.

 

[CTMorseJr]

Thanks for the input (it's nice to actually get a question answered in a forum for a change). According to the RAID manual that came with the mobo, you can use between 1 - 4 HD's for RAID0, but I only intend to use 2 anyways.
Thanks

 

[Bingo13]

On this board you will need to setup both of your Hard Drives on the Raid controllers as Master devices. The AMI649 will do Raid 0, 1, 0+1 depending upon your requirements. I have found it easier to Fdisk the drives before entering the AMI configuration bios just in case as some hard drives I have used failed to initialize correctly. Choose F1 to auto create Raid 0 for your configuration. Confirm Write Cache and DMA is on. Reboot, FDISK/FORMAT, load your OS. Depending upon your OS there are different driver install routines. Download the latest AMI driver set from Iwill, believe it was updated in early May. Also, your system bios will need to be changed for the boot order. You will want to use the Raid100 setting for this setup. Update to the latest system bios after you have loaded your OS.

 

[CTMorseJr]

Sounds good, I'll be trying it tonight. Thanks