SATA (or is it RAID?) setup headache

[rabbagast]

I can not get my new SATA DiamondMax Plus 9 120GB to work with my ASUS P4S8X using a built in Promise SATA RAID controller when the disk is not set up as RAID.

When I boot I can see the disk in the Promise fasttrack utility and under windows it is listed in device manager as a SCSI drive.

I tried to set up the disk in the Computer Management/Disk Management utility in windows but there I dont even see the disk.

My promise fasttrack 376 driver is ver 1.0.15

I had to set it up as a raid 0 array to be able to use the disk in windows. What does this mean for reability & performance? And can you have raid with 1 disk?? Crazy stuff!

Why is everybody and his dog putting raid onto mb's?? In my opinion raid is totaly useless outside a server because-

1. Who is willing to pay twice as much for a slightly faster disk that is twice as likely to crash (raid 0) ?

2. Who is willing to pay twice as much for a disk that is not faster (raid 1)?

3. Who wants the booting to be even slower because the RAID controller must find the disk(s) EVERY time you start the PC?

 

[Crashman]

1.) SATA drives are not faster than IDE versions of the same drive.
2.) You don't need to RAID the drive with a second drive, the RAID controller can treat a single drive as 1 drive JBOD set, which is a single drive anyway.
3.) My motherboard has the ICH5R SATA controller which treats SATA drives as IDE drives in BIOS (although it does offer the higher transfer rates, which can't help with today's drives). Therefor the drives are configured by the motherboard BIOS without the delay a second controller BIOS would add.

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<font color=red>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to an ego as large as Crashman's!</font color=red>

 

[rabbagast]

Thanks for your reply!

Just to clarify :

1. I meant RAID 0 is slightly faster than single drive, not SATA vs IDE. The reason I went for SATA is because I othervice had to share it on an IDE channel with another disk. And that would have made it slower, right?

2. So you mean it will work exactly the same as a single drive on a ordinary (not RAID) controller, even if I have to set it up as RAID 0?

3. Sounds much better. Can you recomend a mb with that (or similar) controller with the 875 chipset?

 

[Crashman]

1) RAID 0 is faster than a single drive
2) I thought you only had one SATA drive
3) ICH5R southbridge is available on various Intel chipset motherboads including the inexpensive Abit IS7 (865PE) board.

<font color=blue>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to a hero as big as Crashman!</font color=blue>
<font color=red>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to an ego as large as Crashman's!</font color=red>

 

[rabbagast]

2. YES, I only have 1 SATA drive. But the only way I can get it to work is by going into the raid controller and setting it up as a RAID array by choosing build array from the meny. If I don't do that windows says it cannot access the disk. IS THAT A PROBLEM, YES OR NO?????

 

[Crashman]

What modes do you have? It shouldn't be a problem.

<font color=blue>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to a hero as big as Crashman!</font color=blue>
<font color=red>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to an ego as large as Crashman's!</font color=red>

 

[rabbagast]

It automaticly selects performance (mode 0) when I choose build array, and I can't change anything. In Windows the disk is listed as a RAID 0+1

 

[Crashman]

Odd, but hey, as long as it works. It's still not RAIDed if their's only one disk, regardless of what the controller says.

<font color=blue>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to a hero as big as Crashman!</font color=blue>
<font color=red>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to an ego as large as Crashman's!</font color=red>

 

[ecar016]

yep, have to enable raid with some sata.....
must be because the raid is bundled into the chipset.

EC


<font color=red> Quantum Computers! - very interesting </font color=red>

 

[advent]

I have a promise PCI adapter (Fastrak S150 SX4) and it behaves exactly the same way: a drive that is not assigned to an array is considered as a spare disk and is thus not available to the system. And there is no "single disk" option, you have to actually build an array with the disk, which makes me believe that it actually destroys its contents when building the array (MBR is reset and you then have to initialize the disk with the disk administration tool).

And there's also no guarantee that you will then be able to read the disk when you move it to another controller. So basically, once the disk is connected to the adapter you'ld better pray for the adapter not to fail. And that's what I really dislike with RAID arrays => you bind yourself to a specific adapter, which then becomes the critical component of the storage subsystem: even RAID10 becomes useless if the adapter fails.

Personnally I created a JBOD array with just one disk, not a RAID0 array. The weird thing (bug) is that the adapter refuses to build a JBOD array with more than one disk so that this should be called JSD (Just a Single Disk) .