RAID on NForce2 boards

How is the setup of the connectors on the board? From the only pics I can see there are only 2 IDE connectors and maybe a floppy connection as well. I'm using the EPOX 8K7A+ and I get 2 regular IDE and 2 HTP372 RAID connectors. Do all NFORCE only have the 2 IDE connections?

I believe all Nforce2 boards use SATA connectors for Raid. So you should have 2 IDE and 2 SATA connectors.

for the SATA connectors, you either have to use SATA drives or buy adapters to allow you to use IDE drives.

Al

So pretty much There is no IDE RAID on NForce2 boards?

Tacoman667 said:

So pretty much There is no IDE RAID on NForce2 boards?

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Thats right as far as I know. I know the Abit and the Asus models are SATA raid. Works pretty good once they figured out the corruption issue.

Al

I was wanting to try out the NForce boards but my whole system is built on RAID 0 configuration. Been that way for years. Does NForce2 chipset give a better IDE perfomance then the KT333 or KT400?

If you are asking if the SATA Raid is faster than IDE Raid, then I would have to say no (unless there are faster SATA specific drives hooked up to the ports, like WD Raptors.)

Al

Thats the new Serial ATA setup right? If so I haven't any of those types of drive, too expensive still. I use dual 60GXP's in a RAID 1 setup. Can I still do this on say, a EPOX 8RDA+?

Tacoman667 said:

Thats the new Serial ATA setup right? If so I haven't any of those types of drive, too expensive still. I use dual 60GXP's in a RAID 1 setup. Can I still do this on say, a EPOX 8RDA+?

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According to the Epox Website, that board does not support Raid (either ide or SATA). You would have to buy a Raid card in order to do it.

Link:http://www.epox.com/html/motherboard-products.asp?socket=socket a&lang=1

Al

Ihave never used an outside sourse for RAID like a PCI card. What kind of differnece in performance should I expect to see by using a PCI card over onboard RAID?

Unfortunatly, I cannot answer that one. The only onboard raid I have used is the ASUS SATA Raid. The other Computer is using an IDE PCI card so I cannot make the comparison with onboard IDE Raid.

I can say my SATA Raid has better benchmarks though (that could be due to different factors, like drive type...etc though)

Maybe someone else can answer the question?

OR, try using the search function using the words "Onboard", "Raid" and "Comparison" as the parameters.
That should give you a list of threads with lots of information about the subject.

Al

typically, if all you're using is raid0, there won't be much difference between using a pci-based raid card and an onboard solution. typically, the benefits from a pci raid card is more raid options (ie. 0+1, jbod, more expensive ones with raid5 etc.) as onboard raid solutions are typically just stripped down versions of the pci based solution. as well, you get less cpu-utilization as the card handles all raid operations.

the new gigabyte nf2 board (the one with the cool blue pcb) has an onboard ide pata raid controller (it's the only as far as i know). the board is still a bit new and i haven't seen any reviews, but it looks promising: ide raid, 4 dimm slots, all of gigabyte's proprietary "dual" stuff like dual bios, dual voltage regs, etc.
the only thing i see lacking with it is a lack of mounting holes around the cpu slot so no waterblocks or big hsfs

How about drilling your own holes? Do Gigabytes even stand up to ABIT and EPOXs?