IDE RAID P5B-DLX

Do I need to buy a PCI IDE RAID Controller to raid my 2 IDE 250GB drives or is there someway to do it with this built in raid controller? I know its a SATA controller right? Does that mean no way to use IDE drives?

on the p5b that i have, there seems to be only 1 IDE channel connection, meaning only 2 devices on the OLD side total. if your cd needs to go there, then you cant put the drives there also.
but, there might be hope, some people did pretty good with sata adapter things, that translate the serial to parellel.
because Platter speed is the REAL bottleneck, and that hasnt changed to much, an adapter wouldnt kill the speed.
but satas are cheap, used good harddrives sell on e-bay easy, and you had to replace eveything else to run the stupid new stuff, might as well plunk down another 250$ and finish the job
A great Hardware based full buffered by hardware raid card, can cost about the same.

Thanks for the reply. I was wrong about my drive details tho..

All I have is
1 X 180GB IDE
1 X 200GB IDE
1 X 250GB IDE
1 X 300GB IDE

So I wont be able to raid any of those I guess since none of them are the same size...

I will just get new sata drives...

Thanks for the reponse...

They can be set up for raid, but you will lose space on one of the drives. Example: if you use the 200 and 250GB drives, you will lose 50GB on the 250GB drive. Also, performance may suffer a bit with different drives. Best would be to have matching drives.

Hey thats great news then. I wouldnt mind losing the 50GB of space. What I am after here is SOLID data reliability. I lost SOOOO much data when that one died. I would glady sacrifice 50GB of space to save 250GB of data....

So I guess now is where do I start.

I do have a PROMISE ULTRA100 TX2 card.. I wonder if I should use that and mod it to the FASTTRACK and raid my drives that way? Or just find a SATA adaptor like mentioned by psy..

Hmm - Im going to give this "software" raid a chance..

http://www.tomshardware.com/2001/09/06/raid_without_additional_hardware/

surjer said:

I do have a PROMISE ULTRA100 TX2 card.. I wonder if I should use that and mod it to the FASTTRACK and raid my drives that way? Or just find a SATA adaptor like mentioned by psy..

Click to expand...

thats a good card, upped the normal IDE speeds LOTS over the OLD board IDEs, it would act SIMILAR to sata. as far as platter speeds goes, it would be ok, and you could always have a upgrade path.
but the sata with the huge writeback caches now 16M, and the massive burst speeds, makes normal OS tasks much faster.
so it depends on the USE.

then on the other hand some people are showing the SAME speed with a SINGLE sata, as with raid 0 on that card. but its benchmarks.
if you put all 4 together on that card, you would blow the SINGLE sata speeds away.

its confusing for me, because the PLATTER speeds did change some for me, because i went to a higher density, higher density less distance to travel for the head on contiguous (or mostly contiguous) data.

if you 2x2ed those on 2 seperate channels on that card, it would still be very very good. so you have 2 arrays, using both channels of the card, about 78Mps continuous. go to the storage foram and you see them doing 80-100 with 2x sata, and 100-200 with 4x sata in raid 0.
BUT they also have rediculous (pure ram) burst speeds.

2x 180 , and 2x 250.
BUT , i know why you got 4 different SIZED drives, cause you bought them at different times, so you would be pairing up some 1/2 dead drives, with some fairly new drives. if they were SPUN-UP for 3 years total time (6 years at 10 hours a day), they are finished, they would be good spare drives, but they would never want to be in a raid 0 striped configuration.

mabey that helps.

Im not really looking for a performance boost at this point. I am thinking of getting a single sata 16mb drive for the OS..

I just want to back my data up on the raid. Ihere usually isnt a TON of read/writes to my big drives. Mostly I rip a 1gb file and throw it on there and maybe refer back to it a few months later. I would be perfectly happy with a SLOW 200GB array. Since both drives are OLD it would strictly be for mirroring. I will use the TX2 and throw the 200 and the 180 on there on seprate channels and let windows RAID them. Then the new SATA drive as my OS and leave the 300 in an external enclosure used for transporting data from one machine to another. (Sharing files with friends) etc....

PS - Thanks soooo much for all your input. As always this forum really pulls through to help its members.

Thanks again!...