Raid 0 Problem

[Bachinat0r]

i have an abit kx7333r motherboard. the latest bios update and the latest 4 in 1 drivers installed. i recently purchased 2 wd800jb drives and put them in a raid 0 configuration. it's all setup and runs great...except for when i go into the raid bios utiltity, it shows both drives as ata/33??? they should be ata/100??? what gives? i even went to western digitals wesite and got a utility that manually sets the transfer speeds? please help!

 

[digitalmaster]

Do you have the correct IDE cables...cheap 40 pin cables can drag a drive down.

Equally as likely, the RAID utility is not up to date and is miss reporting the actual drive specs. Some bundled on board controllers are older models.

If the system is performing well with no errors in the logs, then I would not lose too much sleep over it!

 

[Bachinat0r]

thanks for the reply...i am using the correct cables. they are actually ata/133 certified...and according to abit's website i have downloaded the correct drivers for the raid controller. i actually had to download and use them to even get win xp installed b/c the installation bombed out with the ones that were supplied with motherboard...any other ideas's?

 

[parjoe]

Sounds like you have not enabled the drives to run at ATA100.
In the Raid BIOS setup, make sure you "set" /enable the drives to run at ATA100. Setting the drive transfer speed is key to running them at 100 Mbps, and should be one of the options in the RAID menu.

 

[Bachinat0r]

my only option in the raid setup is to either create, delete, or rename a raid...i have run the utility from western digital to manually set the drive to transfer at ata/100...

 

[Tezzie]

FWIW -I have a pair of Maxtor 133's running RAID 0 and the fact is, for general work it aint' worth it. You hardly see any speed increase over a normal hard drive. Plus now there's serial drives, these are going to be much faster than these clunky old things.

I am seriously considering changing it to security rather than speed but only putting it off becuase of all the hassle reinstalling all the apps etc.

I only mention it to save you time. Obviously if your moving Gbs of data around then its worth having, but if your like me, little spreadsheets, games and the occasional DVD rip (my own DVDs for personal use....kids) then its simply not worth it.

IMHO
Tez

Backups are great but checking if you can restore is more fun.