Raid - Promise 'Lite' - be aware!

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Phill Griffith
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Joined: Jan 30 2001

I have recently purchased a Gigabyte GA-7DXR, with a raid on the motherboard. The device is a sort of upgrade from a previous Dual PIII system, where the board died on me. With the old system i had the Fastrak 100 PCI card and four ATA-100 45gb drives atatched. They were stipped as two 90gb drives. Fantastic. When I purchased the new board it comes with the controller on board, so I connected up the drives, hoping the old configuration would work.

Sadly the promise chip on the motherboard is a LITE version (well the bios is), only allowing one Stipe, and then just two separate drives. A little disapointing. Interestingly, stiping the drives in Win2k, theread write reported by my DC2000 hardware showed a faster transfer.

SeaneyC
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Joined: Mar 11 2001

As i understand - the fasttrak board that you had is a full hardware device - an intel chip deals with all the raid operations, whether it be 0 - 7. I am not familiar with many RAID configs, but it would seem that the "soft-raid" chips present on RAID motherboards do little more with RAID 1 and 0 than the Raid settings in win2k. Also obviously if you are using 4 IDE drives on the fasttrack with 4 headers, but only using 4 drives on 2 headers with a RAID M/B (i'm not familiar with these boards so i'm not aware if they only have 2 or 4/more) then the M/B controller is going to be slow due the the read/write limits of the IDE bus. Um, if anyone else dis-agrees, then please tell me as it means i have the RAID thing well off! Also, did you configure the 4 drives as a RAID0 x Raid 1 config (large fast secure drive) or just 2 large fast drives? (raid 0) The only reason i ask is as i only found out the other day that RAID 5 achieves this failsafe quick configuration with only 3 drives. Clever! Just thought this post might be a bit relevent.