Can I run SATA and IDE drives together?

[Cobra]

Hi,

I think the subject says it all. I have a 40GB and an 80GB hard drive that run on IDE (ATA133) and I want to put them in a new PC that I'm going to build alongside two 160GB SATA drives in a RAID0.

Will the Asus A7N8X Deluxe be capable of handling both the SATA RAID array AND the IDE drives?

Thanks very much,

CobraDMX

[ClayBuster]

Yes it will

[rallynavvie]

Yes, you'll be able to do exactly that. I would warn against the RAID set-up and suggest just using the two SATA drives individually. If you still go ahead with the RAID then at least don't use that as your boot drive or store anything important on it. It isn't that the SATA RAID onboard is bad, I just have 0 trust for RAID 0 anymore.

[Cobra]

Why is that? What happened?

[indolikaa]

RAID 0 spreads the incoming data evenly over all the drives in the array. There is zero redundancy in this case, so if even one of the drives fails, you've lost all your data.

Sounds like our Adobe friend had an array crash once before.

[rkr1958]

RAID 0 spreads the incoming data evenly over all the drives in the array. There is zero redundancy in this case, so if even one of the drives fails, you've lost all your data.

Sounds like our Adobe friend had an array crash once before.

Besides the risk of if one of the two SATA drives go bad then you've lost everything are there any other additional risks of RAID 0 versus using the two SATA drives independently?

I have a D875PBZ motherboard that currently only has two IDE drives hooked to it. 45-GB with O/S and applications and a 120-GB that I used for my video projects. I also have a 60-GB firewire drive attached. I was eventually planning to get a pair of 160-GB SATA drives and take advantage of the my on-board Raid 0. I was planning on using these pair for video projects only (i.e., capture, ripping, editing, encoding, authoring). All data on those drives would be reconstructable in case of failure ... is a Raid 0 configuration in this case a bad idea? I was really looking forward to the blazing speed.

[indolikaa]

Risks?

Not that I can think of. RAID 0 is not the place you want to store data in a permanent format unless you maintain a rigid backup schedule. For myself, RAID 0 is limited to two applications: a 'working' drive for digital video incoming from my DV.avi source, and the boot drive itself.

The 'boot drive' is backed up to DVD-RW and can be restored in about 40 minutes should anything happen. I also update the backup anytime I get updated software or downloads.

For what you've described, a pair of 160GB drives for a RAID editing facility is fine. It's basically what I do, only with much smaller drives.

[Cobra]

But how likely is a RAID array to fail? I haven't ever had a hard drive go bad on me.

Because of the way RAID stripes across the drives, if one section gets corrupted does it destroy everything?

CobraDMX

[indolikaa]

RAID 0 has absolutely 'no' fault tolerance. If one drive loses data the entire array crashes.

http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/20020830/ide_raid2-03.html
http://www.acnc.com/raid.html
and
http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/perf/raid/levels/singleLevel0-c.html

Special Considerations: Using a RAID 0 array without backing up any changes made to its data at least daily is a loud statement that that data is not important to you.

Now, how realistic is a failure?

I've had it happen once with my Asus A7V133 board. One of the drives started clicking, a blue screen came up warning about data integrity on drive C and the computer froze. Both drives were physically fine but the RAID array had to be 'rebuilt' and the backup restored.

[redwudz]

Twice I've had drives permanently fail in a RAID0 setup, lost everything. But I just use it for video editing and temporary storage, so no real problem. I have had the array break down on occasion, but it just reset and I didn't lose anything. I tried RAID0 once for a boot drive, but the OS or the MB seemed to have random problems, like BSOD's and sometimes not booting, so I gave it up. Never could figure out why the problems. I suspected the MB wanted to use the Primary Master only for boot. Just my opinion, but I doubt you would see a big speed increase in most programs from using a RAID0 for a boot drive. I use a 80G boot, (2)X80G RAID0, and a 80G backup. I have SATA onboard, but I already had the IDE drives

[rallynavvie]

All it took was one night trying to do a rush job for a training video with my old 2x80GB RAID 0 array and having a stripe get corrupted not once, but two times in that same night causing me to have to reformat both drives and set the array up twice before finally just capturing to just the 200GB storage drive. Believe it or not I had just as many dropped frames doing it that way and guess what? the drive didn't fail! Ugh, never again. I pulled an all-nighter for that one. And I have a good Promise RAID controller. Now I did pick up 2 more identical 80GB drives (how could you not when they were $20 after rebates at Office Max?) so I've been considering setting up a RAID 5 array with the four of them, but honestly the hard drive space is worth more to me seperate. I've had to get a swap bay because I've done run out of room for archival

See the absurdity of it is the SATA drives are faster than IDE drives anyway. 320GB is a serious amount of room to waste on RAID 0 since it isn't recommended you store anything on it for any length of time. It just seems like a waste of space.

My solution to RAID 0? Seagate ST318453LWs. Two smokin' fast 18GB drives. At 15k rpm rotational speeds they access in 3.6ms and have a bandwidth of 320 MB/sec. I use those two for capturing, encoding, and video scratch. I've used them for 6 months now and no problems with them whatsoever. In fact for a LAN party I loaded BF1942 on one of them and ran a dedicated server AND played the game at the same time.