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A8V promise controller question: can ide Raid & Sata Raid both be used simultaneously?
Hey.
I have not set up my A8V system yet, and it will be a while I think. I was wondering something. There is a parallel Raid connection on the board, can it be used at the same time as the Sata Raid of that controller? In fact, can all three Raid setups be used at the same time, for 6 total Raid drives? |
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In article , Bucky
wrote: Hey. I have not set up my A8V system yet, and it will be a while I think. I was wondering something. There is a parallel Raid connection on the board, can it be used at the same time as the Sata Raid of that controller? In fact, can all three Raid setups be used at the same time, for 6 total Raid drives? In theory, you could put four drives on the 20378 and two on the Southbridge. But the problem is, putting two parallel drives on the 20378 means accesses to the two drives can interfere with one another on the IDE cable and reduce your performance. If you put four drives on there, I would pair a SATA drive with a parallel drive, to make a RAID 0 or RAID 1. If you do RAID0+1, there might be an advantage to putting a SATA+PATA as striped pairs, then mirroring the two pairs against one another, but there is still the potential for the IDE cable to become a limit. For best performance, I would use no more than two drives on the Promise 20378, and either make the drives 2xSATA or SATA+PATA, but avoid PATA+PATA. If you don't care about performance, any combo will work. You can use the Promise 20378 for single drives if you want, and there is an ATA driver available if you don't want to RAID. Since the Promise doesn't support ATAPI, hard drives are a good thing to use with the ATA driver. (That means your CD/DVD ATAPI devices go on the Southbridge.) Southbridge RAID implementations can sometimes be faster than PCI chips, like the Promise 20378, because they may gain access to the North-South bus, without going through a bandwidth limiting PCI bridge. If you don't currently own the disk drives intended for this system, buy 2xSATA and then test them on both interfaces, and make your choice that way. And, if you are doing a striped array, don't put the boot partition on there, because if a stripe breaks, you won't be able to boot. RAIDs are just a PITA to maintain, so there better be a good reason to use one. If you use the mirror option, for example, you still need to do backups (a power supply failure can burn both drives and your data would still be lost). Also, a comfirmed RAID addict would put a UPS on the computer, so a power failure can never desynchronize a mirrored array. HTH, Paul |
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In article , Bucky
wrote: Paul, how likely can a striped RAID break, and what about just going 0+1. I know nothing about RAID really, having never used it. I have only used SCSI non RAID. I wanted to put Windows on the RAID for maximum speed, as my thinking was that speeding up Windows hard drive accesses would speed up my system considerably. For a simple two disk stripe, if either of the two drives fails, your data is toast. So, that is double the risk of a failure. Now, if you think your disks are truly of heroic quality, go right ahead and stripe the boot disk. A 0+1 will certainly fix most simple media failures (but not the "burned by the PSU" type failure). The problem is, most users do not experiment with the four disks and learn how to handle a failure, so when the chips are down, they don't know which disk(s) to grab and replace, and they don't know what buttons in the interface are safe to click or not (like, is "delete array" a safe button ?). And the manual is just useless at explaining all the issues. So, you have four disks in your hands, you know something is busted, but you are paralyzed with fear when it comes time to fix it. I prefer my accidents to be simple ones. Using a single disk for my computer, the disk either works, or it is toast. Maintenance is simple - do backups, buy a replacement disk if the current one breaks. If I want speed, I can buy a single 15K RPM SCSI disk, with a 90MB/sec data rate. One thing you might do, is visit a web site like Promise or Highpoint or the like, and download a manual for a real RAID card. There might be more background info in a real RAID card manual, then the five pages you get in a mobo manual. Paul, could you tell me more about RAID, and/or refer me to a good site that tells more. I am thinking that, well, if I put my non critical stuff on a mirrored array (and yes, I have three UPSs, they just need batteries, but they work, APC 620 & 630s that have network connections) and on non RAID IDE I would be covered. What about JBOD? What is RAID 0, RAID 1, and is RAID 0+1 a combination of striping and mirroring in some way? Also, what is the story on RAID 5? Does it require 4 hard drives, and if so, why didn't Asus build it into the A8V board? Also, thank you VERY much for your excellent reply. I appreciate everyone's help here. RAID5 can be done on as few as three drives. JBOD stands for Just A Bunch Of Disks. 0+1 consists of two pairs of disks, each pair is a stripe, and the pairs mirror one another. If a single disk fails, one stripe breaks, but the pair of disks in the other stripe take over. I'm afraid for the rest of your questions, you'll have to hit a search engine. Due to my lack of experience, there are better sources of info out there than I can provide. To find out about fast disks, www.storagereview.com is a good place to look. They have a performance database, and they keep track of disk speeds, noise and heat. That is where I go, to figure out which brand of disk to buy. For general discussions about building arrays, the forums at 2cpu.com are a lot of fun. The 2cpu people do a lot of server stuff, and that is where RAID is a good thing, in a server environment. Paul |
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