question about serial ata raid on p4pe

hi,

i know a little bit about raid systems (keep multiple copies of data on several harddrives to protect data from disk failure).. and i was wondering about this serial ata raid on the p4pe worked?

i will be using a cdrw (dma), dvdrom (udma) and 1 ata66 harddrive on this motherboard

would it be possible to have each drive on a different ide channel? (ie. cdrw, dvdrom on the 2 ide channels, and the harddrive on this new serial ata raid channel?)

or would i need 2 identical harddrives in order for the serial ata raid channel to work?

thanks in advance!

You actually get 3 parallel ATA connectors on the P4PE, 2 normal ones and one driven by the RAID controller. I would set the divices to master and run one device per channel.

For the serial ATA to work you will need serial ATA hard drives which aren't commonly available yet. You could also use a serial ATA to parallel ATA adapter but that will run you $25-35. I think your best bet would be to wait until serial ATA drives are out.

Now to use the RAID, I believe you have to have 2 identical drives to mirror, but can use 2 different drives to stripe (I could be wrong on this). And like I said above one can run on the parallel ATA controller, but you have to hook up a second to the serial ATA either by means of being a serial ATA drive or an adapter. I personally don't think that running RAID on 2 drives that are running on different controllers at different speeds is all that great an idea.

So if you want to run RAID on your P4PE just wait till serial drives are available (supposedly Seagates in Feb.) and you shouldn't have too much trouble.

RAID requires identical hard drives for striping and mirroring from what I understand. Otherwise, I agree, wait til Serial ATA comes out and it will be worth it. RAID kicks tail.
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