P5WD2-P Raid Question

I just bought a WD 250GB sata hdd for my system. The question is now how best to hook it up.

Right now I'm running a 2 disk raid hooked up to the two red sata (ICH7) connectors. My bios is set IDE Configuration to RAID. This new drive is going to be a backup drive and not part of the raid. Can I connect it to one of the black (ICH7) connectors and just not include it in the raid in the Intel Raid management setup? Or should I put it on the SI raid connector?

Also, since I'm on the subject, the Silicon Image connector is a single connector, but the manual states it's a SATA_RAID2 connector. Does this connector somehow work with the 4 ICH7 connectors when IDE is set as RAID? Never understood how one connector could run a mutiple disk array. If someone could clear that up for me that would be great.

Thanks.

Edit: grammar.

Raid works like this:

There are number of different RAID levels:

Level 0 -- Striped Disk Array without Fault Tolerance: Provides data striping (spreading out blocks of each file across multiple disk drives) but no redundancy. This improves performance but does not deliver fault tolerance. If one drive fails then all data in the array is lost.
Level 1 -- Mirroring and Duplexing: Provides disk mirroring. Level 1 provides twice the read transaction rate of single disks and the same write transaction rate as single disks.
Level 2 -- Error-Correcting Coding: Not a typical implementation and rarely used, Level 2 stripes data at the bit level rather than the block level.
Level 3 -- Bit-Interleaved Parity: Provides byte-level striping with a dedicated parity disk. Level 3, which cannot service simultaneous multiple requests, also is rarely used.
Level 4 -- Dedicated Parity Drive: A commonly used implementation of RAID, Level 4 provides block-level striping (like Level 0) with a parity disk. If a data disk fails, the parity data is used to create a replacement disk. A disadvantage to Level 4 is that the parity disk can create write bottlenecks.
Level 5 -- Block Interleaved Distributed Parity: Provides data striping at the byte level and also stripe error correction information. This results in excellent performance and good fault tolerance. Level 5 is one of the most popular implementations of RAID.
Level 6 -- Independent Data Disks with Double Parity: Provides block-level striping with parity data distributed across all disks.
Level 0+1 – A Mirror of Stripes: Not one of the original RAID levels, two RAID 0 stripes are created, and a RAID 1 mirror is created over them. Used for both replicating and sharing data among disks.
Level 10 – A Stripe of Mirrors: Not one of the original RAID levels, multiple RAID 1 mirrors are created, and a RAID 0 stripe is created over these.



Notice that "True Raid" is when each single drive has it's own channel. The single channel on a board is still raid because it utilizes both drives in a raid configuration but is not considered "true raid" as both drives share a single raid channel.


Now if you are already running raid in IDE mode and have an sata drive and wish to use it as a storage drive, just hook it up to one of the sata connectors on the board and enable that channel in bios. You should'nt have any problems. Be sure tho that you're not connecting it to the sata raid channel. The mobo's manual should have info on that

Hope this helped some.

I just wanted to confirm that I wouldn't screw up my raid if I plugged it in one of those channels.

I plugged it in channel 3 and it works fine. Thanks.

Awsome! Glad all is ok