Will I be able to use 6 HDDs on this MoBo?

[Formula49000]

Hi, I am close to putting together my new pc, but before I do I wanted to figure something out regarding my save space.

I am using this board:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813188025

and I was hoping someone could tell me once and for all:

Can I use 6 Hard Drives on this board?

My setup is going to be two Velociraptors set up in a RAID-0,
and then 4 Hitachi Deskstars (750GB each) in a RAID-10 (0+1).

Will I be able to do that using this board?

Thank you for your expert help. I appreciate any help very much.

[Malpine Walis]

OK, it has six SATA connectors, so you can use six drives. However, to know how many options you have for RAID, you would need to read the manual. Sadly, it is not available from the manufacturer before sale. At least all that I could get off of their web site was the phone number for support.

However, I do have a couple of reservations on that board.

First off, the PATA connector is only ATA 100. I did not know that such beasts still existed in the wild, unless that is a misprint. I would have to do more digging but that might not be that great for a DVD drive.

Second, your desired RAID setup is really not optimal. Why two arrays? You could do a single level 1+0 array and create logical drives on it. You still have the fault tolerance without the risk inherent in the Level 0 array. Then you have the remaining SATA connectors for optical drives.

[Formula49000]

OK, it has six SATA connectors, so you can use six drives. However, to know how many options you have for RAID, you would need to read the manual. Sadly, it is not available from the manufacturer before sale. At least all that I could get off of their web site was the phone number for support.

However, I do have a couple of reservations on that board.

First off, the PATA connector is only ATA 100. I did not know that such beasts still existed in the wild, unless that is a misprint. I would have to do more digging but that might not be that great for a DVD drive.

Second, your desired RAID setup is really not optimal. Why two arrays? You could do a single level 1+0 array and create logical drives on it. You still have the fault tolerance without the risk inherent in the Level 0 array. Then you have the remaining SATA connectors for optical drives.

Well my optical drive is an IDE interface, that means it doesn't use a SATA slot, right? And I will back up my data on my raptors, that is going to be primarily used for my OS and games so hopefully it should be ok.
I used 2 arrays because I wanted more space to store things (this setup gives me over 2 TB) and if I did a RAID10 on the raptors I would be paying the same for only 600GB of space. I hear these drives are pretty reliable, and they have a 5yr warranty so I can get them replaced. If a drive does happen to fail, it'll just be games lost, and I can just re-install them.

[Neuromancer]

OK, it has six SATA connectors, so you can use six drives. However, to know how many options you have for RAID, you would need to read the manual. Sadly, it is not available from the manufacturer before sale. At least all that I could get off of their web site was the phone number for support.

However, I do have a couple of reservations on that board.

First off, the PATA connector is only ATA 100. I did not know that such beasts still existed in the wild, unless that is a misprint. I would have to do more digging but that might not be that great for a DVD drive.

Second, your desired RAID setup is really not optimal. Why two arrays? You could do a single level 1+0 array and create logical drives on it. You still have the fault tolerance without the risk inherent in the Level 0 array. Then you have the remaining SATA connectors for optical drives.



PATA 1 x ATA100 2 Dev. Max
SATA 3Gb/s 6
SATA RAID 0/1/0+1/5/JBOD


According to the specs, Should not have a problem.

The 2 seperate sata ports will be fine for the raptors and the 4 "storage" ports fine for the other drives. As far as nVidias raid support, I know nothing about that.. the stripe and stripe+mirror stuff Should be completely doable though.

The ATA100 is most likely a misprint. They still do have ATA100 hard drives, in fact for sustained transfers like you would have with storage drives.. there would be no differnce in performacne even if it really was 100 and not 133. Only burst rate would transfer faster then 100MB/s and burst is limited to 8MB (sometime 16MB)

As far as it infringing on DVDRW?? Not even close. ATA100 channel supports 3 times the bandwidth a optical drive can handle..