ata133 raid

[crabby117]

Hello All
I'm familiar with SCSI RAID and the more recent SATA RAID technology, but I never gave much thought to ATA133 (IDE) RAID until recently. I'm trying to build an inexpensive server for myself just for educational purposes, and I got a MB with ATA133 RAID that supports 0 and 1. The problem is that I have 3 drives and the RAID BIOS will only make the pair of drives on one channel striped (and the 3rd drive is a separate array) instead of using all three drives in one striped array. That's a [unadvertised] bummer. (Is that typical?)

I guess my question is, is it possible to let the NOS (Win2k Server) handle the RAID instead of letting the RAID BIOS do it? I know that if I go that route, I'll take a performance hit.

 

[dementg]

I've never had a motherboard with built-in RAID, so I don't know if the single channel limitation is typical. I have a Promise FastTrak 100TX2 card, and I'm almost certain it will allow up to 4 drives all in the same array. There's a more expensive version called the FastTrak 100TX4 which has 4 separate drive channels, this might help performance with more than 2 drives since they don't have to share a channel. I think they have ATA-133 versions of those cards by now. The fasttrak cards support (but don't require) 66MHz PCI slots but almost nobody has those. Having said that, those cards probably have little (if any) benefit over your built-in RAID so I wouldn't spend money on them. Because of the PCI bottleneck, the effect of 3 striped drives is just that the transfer rate will remain high deeper into the disk before it starts to drop off.

Yes, Windows NT systems can do software raid. I've never done it, but you have to go into
Computer Management->Disk Management
and set the drives up as "Dynamic disks".
After doing that there should be some options to set up arrays, but since I've never done it I don't know what the exact procedure is.

The nice thing about windows' RAID is that you don't have to allocate all the disk space to a single array. You can set up separate arrays that operate differently, for example you might use the first half of all 3 drives as a RAID-0 array, then set up the second half of 2 drives as a RAID-1 array, and the last half of one drive as a normal drive. I don't know if its possible to set up the boot drive as an array. Also, the Server versions of windows can do RAID-5, which you can't do with any reasonably priced raid hardware.

 

[KimLeece]

Well you don't say which board you have - but i have an Asus A7V333 that is very much how you describe it - a single channel RAID - two drives only, ATA133, Promise Fasttrack Lite on-board controller. I have 4 IDE channels on the board - channels 3 & 4 are the two that get used if you set it up that way - you can choose in BIOS. It works great with one big caveat! I have Windows XP installed on my C: drive and basically use the RAID D: drive for the data part of video editing. At a certain point i decided to convert the drives from FAT32 to NTFS - went great! No problems. Recently I got an update from Microsoft for the NVidia AGP card and it caused problems. I couldn't work out how to fix it so decided to revert back to the old driver that came with the card - went to device manager to delete the driver presuming that Windows would do a new hardware install and my 1 year old daughter hit the computer power switch at the same moment - lost XP just like that - no safe mode - no last known good configuration - nothing. Tried a repair from the CD and finally got it back up - BUT no d: drive - didn't even exist in Disk Management - no - drive - no partition - nothing. In the end I had to re-partition the drives and reformat them FAT32 to recover them at all - (the RAID setup according to the Promise boot screens was fine)
Of course i lost all the data on the drives - lesson learnt!
I really would not recommend using NTFS on this kind of RAID array.

Kim.

'Everybody is ignorant - only on different subjects.'
Will Rogers.