[MNiceGuy]

Today I think I'm going to bite the bullet and go RAID 0 on my sig rig. I currently have three drives and would be adding a fourth. Two would be in RAID 0 for the OS and the other two would be standalone drives for storage. With ICH10R, am I able to switch to RAID in the BIOS and still be able to use my standalone storage drives (currently AHCI) as is or is there going to be a fuss? Last time I played with RAID was on my old 680i and I seem to remember having to reformat all drives in the system.

Also, my P6T is v1 which means I have the onboard SAS controller. I believe I can still use regular SATA drives (only loosing the low-level format option) on this as well. Is there any advantage to going this route?

 

[Eek]

You can raid those two and still use the other 2 flawlessly. No need to format the other non-raid drives.

 

[dralb]

Yeah, when you go into the manager (ctrl & I iirc) you set up the striping on the array. once that it done, it will see the array as one volume. When you have other volumes added, they will all work the same as if you had a single drive vs. an array.

 

[StarryNite]

Or, with 4 drives (only need 3 actually) go with RAID 5 for the redundancy it can provide (writing isn't too good with RAID 5 but the read is almost as fast as RAID 0 -- with RAID 5/0 you'd be smoking with redundancy).

My experience with RAID 0 and a separate storage drives has been dismal, so avoid that setup all together and use an external that the motherboard can't screw up (2 HDD died due to the motherboard flaking and then frying; and currently has another storage drive on another motherboard with read errors).

 

[TDN1979]

What he said. All you do is after you install your two RAID drives and the raid drivers, just set up those two as raid after you hit ctrl-I. I wouldn't even install the other two drives until after you reinstall the OS. Then just install them and you are good to go.

 

[alwaysAMD]

I had my 2 WD2500AAKS in RAID 0, a WD5000AAKS, and a SATA DVD Writer all connected to the same controler and it worked fine so I don't see you should have any problems.

 

[MNiceGuy]

Thanks guys!

EDIT: Can anyone confirm/deny using the Marvell SAS controller on my board for SATA RAID?

 

[TDN1979]

I dont know for sure, I would just try it and see. Might teach us a thing or two

 

[Mr Pink57]

If you have a total of 4 identical drives go for RAID 10.

pink

 

[Berger]

I believe my raid0 setup is using the same or simliar set up on your p6t....mine works perfect and gave the expected results.....I hook up my old ide drive from time to time to back everything up and it is recognized fine by itself

 

[MNiceGuy]

Alright guys thanks again for the words of wisdom. The Spinpoint is out and two brand-new WD 640 AAKS are in! So yes I now have 1TB+ for an OS drive but the 640's were a far better deal than the 320's when I picked them up.

The Vista installer picked up the array on the ICH10R without the driver disc and the secondary drives are doing just fine on their own as non-RAID discs. I'm getting the OS loaded up and then I'll post up a comparison.

 

[Berger]

Quote:

Originally Posted by MNiceGuy Alright guys thanks again for the words of wisdom. The Spinpoint is out and two brand-new WD 640 AAKS are in! So yes I now have 1TB+ for an OS drive but the 640's were a far better deal than the 320's when I picked them up. The Vista installer picked up the array on the ICH10R without the driver disc and the secondary drives are doing just fine on their own as non-RAID discs. I'm getting the OS loaded up and then I'll post up a comparison.

cool stuff, get some benchies on the speed of your array!