8k3a+ ata and raid question

[Dunger]

Hello....been lurking around looking for some info to help build my first self-built system.

I'm going to get a Epox 8k3a+ and have two storage related qustions:

First, If I get a maxtor ata133 drive, is there any problems with having a slower ata on the same controller? Will the maxtor still run at 133 if a slower drive is a slave on the same controller?

Second, can I use the raid controller with just one drive? For example, have 2 Cd devices and 2 hard drives on the regular IDE controllers, and have 1 ide disk on the raid controller? Or do I have to put 2 disks on the raid controller to use it?

Thank you for any info you can give.

 

[jtlee75]

What raid setting are you going to use?stripeing or mirroring
If you use stripeing it will transfer at the slowest drive speed. Mirroring will run at the master drive speed.
You can also use a raid channel for other IDE drives. I have never put an HDD and CD drive on the same raid channel though.






Epox 8K3A+
XP1700 @XP2100(1766mhz)2.0vcore
Corsair pc2700 512 module +.30v
Still climbing

 

[whooping_a_panda]

so it would be possible to put one hd on the raid channels and use IDE1 and IDE2 for cdrom drives?

 

[francisamf]

whooping a panda

yes.

IDE 1 and/or IDE 2 can be used for CDR/W, DVD, etc (optical drives). You can put an HDD on the secondary connections but they will be *** slow.

IDE 3 and/or IDE 4 can only be used with HDDs, as far as I know. You can have them non-raid though.

Cheers,
F

 

[Cotita]

Dunger:
If I get a maxtor ata133 drive, is there any problems with having a slower ata on the same controller? Will the maxtor still run at 133 if a slower drive is a slave on the same controller?

If the 2 drives are the same capacity (like 40gb for example) and speed, there is no problem, no drive actually meets the ATA100 transfer rate so your maxtor won't ever reach 133mb/s no matter what.

The raid controller can be used as an aditional ATA133 IDE controller and as such you can use it with with any number of hard disks, but its not recommended that you install cd-roms or DVDs

If possible dont mix cdroms and hardisk in the same channel, it lower performance significantly

 

[jtlee75]

Other IDE drives can be used on the raid channels as well. I have a cdrw and dvd-ram on mine