SATA ports on the ASUS M4N78 PRO motherboard?

I am thinking of buying an ASUS M4N78 PRO motherboard. It has six
SATA ports. The manual says that ports five and six must be used in
RAID or AHCI mode. What types of drives can be used in AHCI mode?
What types of drives can NOT be used in AHCI mode? Are there any
Windows XP AHCI drivers?

The manual also says, "Due to chipset limitations, when you set any
of the SATA ports to RAID mode, all SATA ports run at RAID mode
simultaneously."

Does this mean that if you have two drives in a mirrored RAID, you
cannot use any optical drive or any single hard drives on the
motherboard ports? Thank you in advance for all replies.
--
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Daniel Prince wrote:
I am thinking of buying an ASUS M4N78 PRO motherboard. It has six
SATA ports. The manual says that ports five and six must be used in
RAID or AHCI mode. What types of drives can be used in AHCI mode?
What types of drives can NOT be used in AHCI mode? Are there any
Windows XP AHCI drivers?

You have it backwards, the drices do not care, i.e. all work.
The problem here is that (at least on my mainboard), you may
have to use all ports in AHCI if you want ro use the last two.

Win XP AHCI drivers exist, but (it being a stupid MS product)
are not quite easy to install. You see, without AHCI you
cannot install the drivers as XP thinks it does not need them.
With AHCI, XP cannot access the drives, and if your board
is like mine, that means any drive. Pretty braindead.

The manual also says, "Due to chipset limitations, when you set any
of the SATA ports to RAID mode, all SATA ports run at RAID mode
simultaneously."

Does this mean that if you have two drives in a mirrored RAID, you
cannot use any optical drive or any single hard drives on the
motherboard ports? Thank you in advance for all replies.

Possibly. But you should not use mainboard RAID anyways. Better
use software RAID or get a separate RAID controller. You also
should have a spare RAID controller (not needed with software
RAID obviously), if you still want to be able to access you data
in case the RAID controller dies. This does happen in practice.

Arno
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Arno wrote:

Win XP AHCI drivers exist, but (it being a stupid MS product)
are not quite easy to install. You see, without AHCI you
cannot install the drivers as XP thinks it does not need them.
With AHCI, XP cannot access the drives, and if your board
is like mine, that means any drive. Pretty braindead.

What if you put the drivers on an IDE (PATA) drive or a USB drive?
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I don't understand why they make gourmet cat foods. I have
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Arno wrote:

Possibly. But you should not use mainboard RAID anyways. Better
use software RAID or get a separate RAID controller.

How much CPU time does a software RAID consume compared to an
inexpensive separate RAID controller? Or does it not really matter
if you have three or more CPU cores?
--
I don't understand why they make gourmet cat foods. I have
known many cats in my life and none of them were gourmets.
They were all gourmands!

Daniel Prince wrote
Arno wrote

Possibly. But you should not use mainboard RAID anyways.
Better use software RAID or get a separate RAID controller.

How much CPU time does a software RAID consume
compared to an inexpensive separate RAID controller?

**** all.

Or does it not really matter if you have three or more CPU cores?

Doesnt even matter with modern single core systems either.

The only time you get much cpu use is when replacing one of the drives etc.

Daniel Prince wrote
Arno wrote

Win XP AHCI drivers exist, but (it being a stupid MS product)
are not quite easy to install. You see, without AHCI you
cannot install the drivers as XP thinks it does not need them.
With AHCI, XP cannot access the drives, and if your board
is like mine, that means any drive. Pretty braindead.

What if you put the drivers on an IDE (PATA) drive

Doesnt help.

or a USB drive?

The problem is getting XP to load them from there.

Daniel Prince wrote:
Arno wrote:

Possibly. But you should not use mainboard RAID anyways. Better
use software RAID or get a separate RAID controller.

How much CPU time does a software RAID consume compared to an
inexpensive separate RAID controller? Or does it not really matter
if you have three or more CPU cores?
--

RAID0 and RAID1 are pretty light users of CPU time, until you
need to rebuild a RAIDset following a HD replacement. RAID5 does
require more computes during writes. So, I'd be willing to
user software RAID for RAID0/1, but I'd think seriously about
hardware for RAID5/6.
--
Cheers, Bob

Daniel Prince wrote:
Arno wrote:

Win XP AHCI drivers exist, but (it being a stupid MS product)
are not quite easy to install. You see, without AHCI you
cannot install the drivers as XP thinks it does not need them.
With AHCI, XP cannot access the drives, and if your board
is like mine, that means any drive. Pretty braindead.

What if you put the drivers on an IDE (PATA) drive or a USB drive?

The driver files are not the problem. The OS is. If you put the
OS on an IDE or USB drive, yes, that works.

Arno

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Arno Wagner, Dr. sc. techn., Dipl. Inform., CISSP -- Email:
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Cuddly UI's are the manifestation of wishful thinking. -- Dylan Evans

Daniel Prince wrote:
Arno wrote:

Possibly. But you should not use mainboard RAID anyways. Better
use software RAID or get a separate RAID controller.

How much CPU time does a software RAID consume compared to an
inexpensive separate RAID controller? Or does it not really matter
if you have three or more CPU cores?

Inexpensive RAID controllers are FakeRAID (a.k.a. BIOS RAID)
and are software RAID anyways, just without the advantages.
And, yes, it does not matter, unless you are RAIDing SSDs.
The CPU overhead for HDDs is small (single digit percentages,
typically), unless you have a doubly degraded (2 drives missing)
RAID6.

Arno
--
Arno Wagner, Dr. sc. techn., Dipl. Inform., CISSP -- Email:
GnuPG: ID: 1E25338F FP: 0C30 5782 9D93 F785 E79C 0296 797F 6B50 1E25 338F
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Cuddly UI's are the manifestation of wishful thinking. -- Dylan Evans

Bob Willard wrote:
Daniel Prince wrote:
Arno wrote:

Possibly. But you should not use mainboard RAID anyways. Better
use software RAID or get a separate RAID controller.

How much CPU time does a software RAID consume compared to an
inexpensive separate RAID controller? Or does it not really matter
if you have three or more CPU cores?
--

RAID0 and RAID1 are pretty light users of CPU time, until you
need to rebuild a RAIDset following a HD replacement. RAID5 does
require more computes during writes. So, I'd be willing to
user software RAID for RAID0/1, but I'd think seriously about
hardware for RAID5/6.

RAID5/6 is more I/O intensive. CPU load does not matter even
there, unless your CPU is really, really slow or you have
a RAID6 with 2 drives missing. Just to give you a number,
my old AMD Athlon64 X2 5600+ does 5.2GB/s for an undegraded,
Linux software RAID6. So you need something like 20 current
SSDs in one RAID6 array to saturate one core.

What does matter is that you have a fast datapath to the
controller. PCI-E attached SATA controllers are typically
fine.

Arno
--
Arno Wagner, Dr. sc. techn., Dipl. Inform., CISSP -- Email:
GnuPG: ID: 1E25338F FP: 0C30 5782 9D93 F785 E79C 0296 797F 6B50 1E25 338F
----
Cuddly UI's are the manifestation of wishful thinking. -- Dylan Evans