Now that I’ve got my upgrade system up and running with Seagate IDE Master and Slave drives (80GB +120 GB) from the previous system, I’ve been trying to understand the capabilities of my Gigabyte GA-K8NSNXP-939 (nVIDIA nForce3 Ultra chipset) motherboard with respect to SATA drives and Raid – my knowledge of these subjects was zero until yesterday. As my 4 year old IDE Master drive has begun to make worrying loud chatter noises it might be time to replace it, but go for a pair of SATA drives instead.

The motherboard can take the usual 4 IDE devices on master and slave combined. There also appear to be two sets of two onboard SATA connectors – one set uses the nVIDIA nForce3 Ultra chipset and the other set uses the Silicon Image Sil3512 chipset. Not that I want to, but does this mean you could have 4 SATA devices installed as well as the 4 IDE devices – and presumably none of the above would preclude using my Maxtor One Touch for keeping a backup off site in the workshop?

Two SATA drives configured as mirrored RAID1 seem to be the way to go for me - integrity more important than performance. Which chipset is preferable to set these up on? To my uninformed mind the nVIDIA BIOS set up looks easier than the Sil3512 BIOS set up. The User’s Manuals are not too clear to me - in a mirrored RAID set up how do the drives show up – is one, say, C and one D, or do you only see them as C? Also when you install XP presumably this is installed on both SATA drives at the same time? Does partitioning one drive result in the mirrored drive being partitioned as well?

Sorry for the multitude of very basic questions but I’m on totally new ground here. Finally any recommendations as to which SATA drives to go for………...thinking of around 2x120 GB?

The nVidia SATA connectors will probably be faster and easier to set up. From what I have read you won't need to hit F6 during the Windows setup to install drivers for it.

Technically, yes, you could attach up to 4 IDE and 4 SATA drives with that board. You would need a rather large PSU, larger case and some good cooling.

As for the drives, I have two 80GB Seagate SATA drives that are working great as a SATA RAID 0 array. If you want speed, nothing can beat the Western Digital Raptor drives (I'm sure Richard will let you know about this ;) ). They are more expensive though.

There have been a couple of threads lately about RAID setups, so you might to give those a read.

goates

Speechless Two,

In order to better understand RAID, I send people to this Article by Anand Tech from back in June of 2001:

IDE RAID Comparison (http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=1491)

Now what you want is a pair of SATA Drives, I would recommend 2 JD Drives from WD. You want a matched pair of drives.

With the nVidia SATA you will need to hit F6 during the install and you will have two sets of Drivers to load. (I helped someone over the phone last week setup the nVidia RAID 0 with a pair of WD Raptors and he needed two Drivers in order to install WinXP.)

I would look at the WD 800JD since the price should be very good for two of them. Since you are not after speed, that will give you a good amount of storage without crushing your wallet.

When you partition the Drive during the WinXP install, the Mirrored Drive will automatically be Partitioned too. WinXP will not even know the second Drive is there. Personally I have no use for Partitioning. The OS can handle very large Hard Drives, so I just keep things simple. But that is up to your personal preferences.

Take Care,

Richard

Thanks for the comments, guys. An excellent article, Richard - most helpful, and I've located a pair of the WD 800JD drives at a very reasonable price, but as I'm shortly away for a week I'll have to leave ordering until I get back.

Re partitioning, I have PartitionMagic 8.0 which works superbly on my existing drives. As I'm comfortable with that I guess there would be no problem using that to partition the RAID drives after XP has been installed?

Tony

Tony,

Sounds like a good plan. :ok:

Take Care,

Richard

Well, I'm going to dare to differ here from our friend Richard. I've got onboard SATA/RAID on my superb MSI K7N2 Delta ILSR mobo (thanks Richard) and I spent a fair while fiddling with it and inevitably, reading up stuff on the Web and quizzzing local gurus.

Although I accept that SATA and (PCI Express) are the wave of the future, it is worth noting that it's still quite hard to run out of bandwidth on the IDE bus. SATA drives are marginally faster but there still isn't a lot in it and unless you are addressing really large seqential datasets (e.g. video editing) you won't notice a lot of difference. The jump between 7200 and 10,000 rpm is much more significant for drives (if you can accept the increased heat and noise).

Again, the average home punter won't notice much speed increase from RAID 1 - there isn't much and writes may be slower. Data security is much lobbied about, but the main risk for your data is not so much the HDD dying (you are backed up aren't you?) but malware, user error and data corruption. RAID 1 won't save you from that - you just have two scrambled drives instead of one.

RAID 0 will add speed, but at sigificantly increased risk - lose just one drive from hardware malfunction and the other is useless. Not a problem for the games speedfreaks who reinstall their OS weekly anyway.

In the limited budget SOHO situation if you are concerned about data security and getting back up again fast the best bet has to be a drive caddy and a recent drive image onto an identical HDD stored separately.

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"Bother," said Pooh as he struggled with /etc/sendmail.cf, "it never does quite what I want. I wish Christopher Robin was here."

I appreciate I won’t notice any speed increase with RAID 1 – the decision really is what do I replace a dying IDE drive with…..another IDE drive or take the opportunity to go for SATA/RAID as I have the motherboard capability and it came with SATA cables.

In my situation the immediate data integrity of the RAID1 set up appeals, although I appreciate it can still go wrong. Yes, I do back up daily (been caught too often in the distant past:{) – I have a 300GB Maxtor One Touch for that - and I also keep a copy of my data files partition on my second IDE drive as well, with archive material double burned to DVD.

Mac the Knife,

I did not mention any speed boots from RAID 1. We were addressing the possibility of hardware failure.

As for going SATA vs IDE, the current price of the 80Gb SATA vs 80Gb IDE is closer then the prices for getting two SATA to IDE Adapters (which do not work well at all) so he could use IDE Drives on his SATA RAID and the price for getting a PCI IDE RAID Card which is what he would need to run RAID 1 as he wants if he were to use IDE vs SATA Drives.

Now when we talk about RAID 0 with SATA WD Raptors, you are hitting the upper limit of what the PCI Bus can theoretically run at, so even a PCI SATA RAID Card is not an option, you need an Onboard SATA RAID Solution.

Right now with an Athlon64 setup and a pair of Raptor IIs, you can do the install of WinXP in 6 to 7 minutes. It is amazing the speed you can get these days out of a PC. :ok:

Take Care,


Richard

P.S. The cost difference here is $6.49 between the 800JB and the 800JD.

Sounds good. Let us know how you get on and how it feels.
Sure wish I could afford a set of Raptors just for the fun of it....

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$> man woman
$> Segmentation fault (core dumped)

Roger that Richard - our posts crossed!

Next year I\'ll be going for an Athlon 64 setup so will need your advice re mobos

Incidentally, I have 1 x 512MB PC2700 DDR SDRAM on my K7N2 and want to go up to 1GB [2 x 512MB](mostly for Linux). What speed memory should I be looking for for max. performance? DDR 333, DDR 400 or what?

{Hope you don\'t mind me hijacking your thread Speechless}

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"I plan to proactively leverage my synergies to optimize my throughput all while valueing diversity"

Mac the Knife,

Best performance comes when you keep the CPU to FSB Ratio set to 1:1. You want them to run Syncronisly.

Most CPU's have a 400Mhz FSB, so you need to have at least PC-3200 these days. Right now PC-2100 is dead and PC-2700 is dieing off.

The future will be at least PC-3200 until the DDRIIs become mainstream.

Take Care,

Richard

Re the 80GB WD 800's, an internet supplier in the UK (oops - had to edit out the name for fear of contravening the advertising rules) has the WD800JB for £34.94 and the WD800JD for £35.57..........just 63 pence difference.

Tony

Tony,

When you are looking for hardware, do not worry about listing where you are finding the hardware. (It is a good thing to list where you are thinking of buying from, in case it is a place that is not reputable and another forum member could alert you.)

No one in these forums is connected to any of the major E-Tailers. No one is going to accuse you of anything. After all, we are not in the Pvt Flying or Wannabe Forums. ;)

In this forum we all work together to help each other. (Something other forums could learn a lot from.) :ok:

Take Care,

Richard