A7V266-E RAID question-Plz help

Hey All,
I need to know if I HAVE to use Raid on this mobo?
I mean, do I have to use 2 HDD's or can I use just 1?
I have 1 20 gig HHD right now and lack of funds prevents me from another. Can I just use the 1?
I am new to this RAID world stuff.
Any info would be GREATLY appreciated.

It's a version 2.0 mobo



Thanks.

You don't have to use RAID. That mobo (like it's older brother, the A7V133) have connections for IDE (standard harddrives) and connections for ATA/RAID.

that's THE best explanation I've heard yet !

Thanks, I have an ATA 100 maxtor. Gonna sit down with the book tonight.

sorry for sounding dumb but what is RAID exactly I know it has something to do with high rate data transfer. It's one of those few things on a MOBO i havent fully figured out yet.

Im thinking of putting a second HDD in for music etc. would this RAID help me or be necessary to do this?

dreamtfk said:

sorry for sounding dumb but what is RAID exactly I know it has something to do with high rate data transfer. It's one of those few things on a MOBO i havent fully figured out yet.

Im thinking of putting a second HDD in for music etc. would this RAID help me or be necessary to do this?

Click to expand...

That's not a dumb question. RAID is an acronym for Redundant Array of Independant Disks. In its most basic form, its taking a whole bunch of hard drives and mashing them together, so your OS thinks its one BIG hard drive. There are several flavours of RAID, but the most common are:

RAID-0: Fast r/w. No redundancy. AKA Striping

RAID-1: Fast r slow w. AKA Mirroring. Takes all data from disk one and copies it to disk 2, so if disk 1 dies, disk 2 can take over

RAID-0+1: Fast r slow w Combination of both of the above.

RAID-5: Not sure about the r/w speeds. What it does is back up a little bit of each drive on the other drives. So drive 1 has a bit of 2 and 3, drive 2 has a bit of 1 and 3, and drive 3 has a bit of 1 and 2. So say disk 2 dies, you can pull that disk from the array and slip in another one and use your RAID software to rebuild it from the data on the other 2 disks. AKA Parity

Hope that makes sence ^_^

Ok that makes sense. I think my MOBO supports RAID 0 and i'm only gonna have 2 disks. So how do I enable it or should I get a software for using 2 HDD's? One connector of the IDE connectors of the 4 I have is for Raid.

dreamtfk said:

Ok that makes sense. I think my MOBO supports RAID 0 and i'm only gonna have 2 disks. So how do I enable it or should I get a software for using 2 HDD's? One connector of the IDE connectors of the 4 I have is for Raid.

Click to expand...

To successfully use RAID, you should have 2 harddrives of the same make and model and size (a friend of mine had his identical right down to the batch number!), and the jumper on your board set to use RAID, rather than ATA (which is default from the factory). When you install your Windows, you have to install the RAID drivers (you can ONLY use RAID w/ an NT operating system or *nix) and Windows will install on the RAID array. I'm sure that there is more, but I don't know it. I've never tried setting up a RAID array.

I have been using raid0 for almost a year now. I have an A7V133 board that has lasted through 98se,ME, and now XP home using raid0. Your board manual should have a section devoted to raid and how to set it up. I don't know the exact layout of your board but you should have two blue ide connectors side-by-side below the pirmary and secondary ide's(one blue, one black). You need to hook one drive to each of the blue connectors using 40pin-80wire ribbon cables. When you first install your array be advised that you will have to do a complete fdisk and re-format ofyour drives. So back up anything you can't live without onto a cdr or similar. When you boot-up the first time you should see the fast track set-up screen, and follow instructions for auto set-up in desktop mode. After you have set-up your array you can then do a normal fdisk and re-format any number of partitions you choose. If you use two 20's you will see 40gb approximately. It treats your array like one big drive. I use two Maxtor 60's. The array will not appear on your boot screen, so don't be surprised because it has it's own boot screen to check the drives at boot-up. If you are going to use XP you will need a special promise driver promisexp.exe from the ASUS website. I hope this helps some. You can e-mail me at anytime and I will help if I can. You can reach me through msn messenger also.

So after you do all that you can acsess two HDD's under the same OS?

I want to add one more HDD just dont see why you must use RAID to do this. anyone explain a little please?

To add an additional drive without using raid, you can either put both drives on the primary ide connector, same ribbon, one master & one slave. Or you can set the ata/raid jumper to ata and put each drive on it's own ribbon cable using the two blue ide connections. Then you will have two separate drives having to format only the drive you install. If you use the ata 100 to format a drive you cannot go back and use the drive on ata66 without re-formating. If you want to transfer a drive formated in ata66 to an ata100 it will work but at reduced effeciency. I confess that I don't understand why this is so, but it is. Something to do with data sector sizes I am told. If you decide to ever use the raid option, it works best with new matched high speed drives of any size. If this is still to confusing, do a forum search for more information, or try some of the hardware sites for how-to's. Good luck.

Ok cool, I don't know though why you would want to format in ata66 when you can do ata100.