P4P800 dx and raid config

Hi!
I was wondering how to config the raid setup.
I have installed WinXp but didn't install any additional
drivers for raid when it said like that during the winxp setup
(ohwell).
Can I still use raid?
Also my master drive is NTFS and the slave one is FAT.
Do I have to convert them so they match for raid?

If I use raid 1 (notice, I donnu noting 'bout raid! ) then
the slave drive is a mirror of the master,right?
But I have different data on the slave drive. Does
that get/has to be erased???

Thanx a million.

--NiTCOM

that is one of the STUPIDEST things that I experienced with the P4P800. (that and the gheyest BIOS that I've ever seen in my whole life...)

luckily for me, I still had my floppy from my Abit IC7 board which had the SATA raid drivers on it that I needed.

had it not been for that Abit floppy, I wouldnt have been able to install the O.S. using my dual Raptor setup on RAID 0.

funny how the P4P800 is supposed to be such a good mobo but yet its so cheezy to the fact that it doesnt even come with a floppy with drivers.

(oh, and by the way, I ditched the P4P800 after having it for about seven hours and went back to my good 'ol Abit IC7.)

ozziegn said:

that is one of the STUPIDEST things that I experienced with the P4P800. (that and the gheyest BIOS that I've ever seen in my whole life...)

luckily for me, I still had my floppy from my Abit IC7 board which had the SATA raid drivers on it that I needed.

had it not been for that Abit floppy, I wouldnt have been able to install the O.S. using my dual Raptor setup on RAID 0.

funny how the P4P800 is supposed to be such a good mobo but yet its so cheezy to the fact that it doesnt even come with a floppy with drivers.

(oh, and by the way, I ditched the P4P800 after having it for about seven hours and went back to my good 'ol Abit IC7.)

Click to expand...

Hi!
Apparantly all disks have to be erased for a raid config, as stated in the manual. Well, I'm not up for that right now. I installed the raid drivers anyway from inside of Windows since it asked for it too. SO I guess I keep it the old way for now, until I have time to reinstall everything again(after which numbers of installation do I get the *golden floppy* ???
I still like the board as it seems to be faster then my p4s533 even with slow components (1.6 cpu and 2100 rams.

Does mirroring really works? Can I savely mirror back a partition and i will have all the infos of the old drive? I wondering how well that works.

--NITCOM

I set up IDE RAID-1 with this mobo using 2 new WD SE 80 gb hds. While the mobo doesn't come with a floppy to set up raid, there is a utility on the mobo cd that will create the floppy you need to install windows xp. You can read about it on the pdf manual on the cd. It won't matter what file system your hds are in right now since windows install will change all that for you.

Ferd

blockdoc said:

I set up IDE RAID-1 with this mobo using 2 new WD SE 80 gb hds. While the mobo doesn't come with a floppy to set up raid, there is a utility on the mobo cd that will create the floppy you need to install windows xp. You can read about it on the pdf manual on the cd. It won't matter what file system your hds are in right now since windows install will change all that for you.

Ferd

Click to expand...

Can I config raid0 with a 80 gig master and a 15 gig slave drive?

thanks.

I have RAID-0 configured on the rig in my sig and that array consists of 2 Seagate SATA 80bg drives read as 1 160 gb drive in raid. You could try setting your 80 and 15 gb drive in RAID-0 and I think it would read the array as a single 95 gb, but I think you would lose the performance advantage of striping once the 15 gb drive was full if the BIOS will let you setup this array with such disparate drive sizes. JBOD would be a better way to go with disparate drive sizes if you want to see 1 big drive. RAID-0 works best with identical drives. You would not want to set your 80 and 15 gb drives as RAID-1 since you could only mirror the smaller drive.

Ferd

blockdoc said:

I have RAID-0 configured on the rig in my sig and that array consists of 2 Seagate SATA 80bg drives read as 1 160 gb drive in raid. You could try setting your 80 and 15 gb drive in RAID-0 and I think it would read the array as a single 95 gb, but I think you would lose the performance advantage of striping once the 15 gb drive was full if the BIOS will let you setup this array with such disparate drive sizes. JBOD would be a better way to go with disparate drive sizes if you want to see 1 big drive. RAID-0 works best with identical drives. You would not want to set your 80 and 15 gb drives as RAID-1 since you could only mirror the smaller drive.

Ferd

Click to expand...

What exactly does JB0D ?
Is there a way do turn off the autodetection of the bios for the raid??

JBOD = just a bunch of disks. Use this if you have several smaller hds you want to combine into 1 large hd as seen from the OS. I've never used this form of RAID.

I'm not sure you can turn off autodetect without modifying the BIOS.

I had 2 extra 20gb drives so I decided to play with IDE raid that came on the P4P800 Deluxe. The drives are both Maxtor 7200rpm but one is ATA66 and the other is ATA133. This is just for sh*ts and giggles so who cares, right?

I didn't need any floppy boot disk to get to the raid drives. The VIA bios asks you to hit "tab" to get into their bios (seperate from the mobo bios) to configure the drives, then you reboot. So I have both 20gb drives on the PRI_IDE channel for the RAID controller. I go into the VIA bios and set up the 2 drives for RAID0. Now when I boot, I see the VIA bios recognize the drives and then it show both configured as RAID0.

So I boot into Windows XP and go into Drive mgmt and format the logical raid drive that shows up as 38gb. I ran Atto on my 80gb WDse drive and the newly created Raid0 array.

80gb WDse - 32000/28000 (write/read)
38gb raid0 - 54000/49000 (write/read)

I didn't get a chance to test my 40gb drive because I was lazy and I couldn't get it connected as a slave in the case so I just left the 80gb as a master on the end of the cable.

Some other comments about this board...

The drives on the VIA controller doesn't have to be configured as raid arrays so you can have up to 8 IDE drives with this board w/o any controller cards. You can't put optical drives on the VIA controller though. The VIA chip also supports up to 4 ide drives in RAID0, 0+1, 1 and JBOD configurations.

With the SATA controller on the ICH5R controller, you can have up to 10 hard drives on this board.

Now I'm thinking I need to buy another 80gb WDse drive to configure RAID0.

-Bobby

You don't need a floppy boot disk unless you're trying to install windows to a raid array. You're right that you can just configure raid-0, or raid-1 with 2 hds that are diffierent from your boot hd.

Bobby, if you're thinking about adding another 80 gb hd to setup another raid-0 array, you will lose all your data on the current hd. You would need to reinstall your OS, etc, which is where you would need that driver disc you need to make from the mobo cd-rom.

blockdoc - Thanks. I was looking into it and you do need those drivers. They're in the cd that came with the board and I already made a diskette. Why? I just ordered 2 Maxtor 80gb SATA drives

I've built tons of servers with raids way back when (when I had a pet dinosaur) and never thought about raids for desktop systems until I actually got my board and started playing with it. I wasn't even planning on using a raid setup.

-Bobby

80gb WDSE, 40gb Maxtor (unplugged b/c I'm lazy), 38gb Raid0

blockdoc said:

JBOD = just a bunch of disks. Use this if you have several smaller hds you want to combine into 1 large hd as seen from the OS. I've never used this form of RAID.

I'm not sure you can turn off autodetect without modifying the BIOS.

Click to expand...

With the new bios v.1008.04 you can actually disable raid, also
powerup keys have been added/. cool.

blockdoc said:

You don't need a floppy boot disk unless you're trying to install windows to a raid array. You're right that you can just configure raid-0, or raid-1 with 2 hds that are diffierent from your boot hd.

Bobby, if you're thinking about adding another 80 gb hd to setup another raid-0 array, you will lose all your data on the current hd. You would need to reinstall your OS, etc, which is where you would need that driver disc you need to make from the mobo cd-rom.

Click to expand...

Wait a minute. So if in the future I was sitting in front of a pile of hardware to build a new system, I would have to build it, install the OS on a non-RAIDed HDD, use the CD to make a floppy, then destroy the OS and anything else on the disk and start all over again with a new OS installation? That sounds a little crazy (configuring a hard drive and installing an OS just to coppy files to a floppy). Hopefully I have it wrong.

JKeefe - yes, you have it wrong. The drivers for the raid is on the cd that comes with the motherboard. You can copy them to a floppy for the OS install.

When you make a new raid, you lose all data on both drives. I think that's what he meant.

I just ordered 2 80gb SATA drives for a raid0. I'm keeping my 80gb PATA drive for storage and getting rid of the 40gb and the 2 raided 20gb drives.

-Bobby

Bobby said:

JKeefe - yes, you have it wrong. The drivers for the raid is on the cd that comes with the motherboard. You can copy them to a floppy for the OS install.

Click to expand...

Can you copy files from CD to floppy without an OS?

When you make a new raid, you lose all data on both drives. I think that's what he meant.

Click to expand...

I know that, that's why I'm amazed that it appears you need to install an OS just to make a floppy.

you need to make that floppy on another computer first. then on your new system when you install your OS you will have an opportunity to give the install program the drivers to set up raid from the floppy you made.

Bobby,

Are you going to install your OS on your RAID-0 array? I've been told that windows runs slower from a RAID-0 drive. Is that true?
Just wondering.

blockdoc said:

Bobby,

Are you going to install your OS on your RAID-0 array? I've been told that windows runs slower from a RAID-0 drive. Is that true?
Just wondering.

Click to expand...

That was my master plan. Why would it run slow on raid0? I've been hearing that windows load times are much faster.

-Bobby

Bobby,

The system I setup with this ASUS mobo I built with 2 WD SE IDE 80gb HDs in RAID-1. This system is for the wife and kids. I don't get on their computer much so I didn't want to have to fool around with backing up their data. Drives are so inexpensive I figure this is cheaper than buying a tape backup drive. Backing up to tape is such a chore anyway. I have the drive(s) partitioned in 30gb segment for the OS and progs and the remainder for data.
When I talked to the tech support guy at ASUS he recommended 2 partitions since windows gets corrupted if its partition is too large. I'm not sure if that is really true or not.

I don't know why windows would run slower on a raid-0 drive. Maybe it's something to do with the swap file being on the same drive? Anyway, on my rig my os is on an ide drive. I have 2 other SATA drives in RAID-0 for video file editing. I did put windows swap file on the RAID-0 drives since windows is installed on the IDE drive. I can't really tell if it's any faster. Is there some benchmark that can test that?