IDE RAID

Are there any 865 or newer boards with on-board IDE RAID, or is my only
choice SATA RAID?

In article b_Y2d.46872$OZ6.16989@okepread06, "Ted Dawson"
wrote:

Are there any 865 or newer boards with on-board IDE RAID, or is my only
choice SATA RAID?

For the 875/865 era, the Southbridge offers 4 x PATA drives and
2 x SATA drives, and for boards that have ICH5R (deluxe boards),
the SATA can be run in RAID mode. A number of these boards also
have a Promise 20378, which has 2 x SATA and one PATA cable. You
could RAID two IDE drives on a Promise 20378, but by sharing the
PATA cable, performance will be eroded.

On the 915/925 boards, I believe Intel has reduced the PATA interface
to a single cable on ICH6, while offering four SATA ports. This
is all part of Intel's plan to wean users off PATA. To compensate
for this deficiency, Asus offers the iteusa.com IT8212 PATA RAID,
which has two IDE connectors and allows four drives to be connected.
I haven't seen any benchmarks posted for this chip, so cannot say
whether it is a good chip for RAID or not. So, have a look in the
P5xxx part of the motherboard web page, as the specs for some of
them will include the IT8212. Some of the boards use PCI Express,
others AGP, some have DDR2 and others DDR, so you can search until
you get the right level of reuse of your current components.

You could always buy a separate controller card. The only one I
would avoid, is any product with a CMD0680 chip on it, as the
RAID on that one is "soft RAID". The down side of separate
controller cards, is getting them to work with other motherboard
disk subsystems. If you plan on booting from a separate controller
card, sometimes it means disabling other hardware on the motherboard
to get it to work.

As to whether any Southbridge has IDE RAID built in, I don't remember
any.

HTH,
Paul

"Paul" wrote in message news:nospam-

-snip

You could always buy a separate controller card. The only one I
would avoid, is any product with a CMD0680 chip on it, as the
RAID on that one is "soft RAID".

All [S]ATA RAID is software/firmware RAID except fancy/expensive cards like
3Ware and top Promise cards. I know of NO onmobo HW [S]ATA RAID...it's all
software/firmware.


The down side of separate
controller cards, is getting them to work with other motherboard
disk subsystems. If you plan on booting from a separate controller
card, sometimes it means disabling other hardware on the motherboard
to get it to work.

As to whether any Southbridge has IDE RAID built in, I don't remember
any.

HTH,
Paul

"Ted Dawson" wrote in message
news:b_Y2d.46872$OZ6.16989@okepread06...
Are there any 865 or newer boards with on-board IDE RAID, or is my only
choice SATA RAID?

Why would you want anything but SATA RAID given that Raptors are SATA?