sata raid questions

[nick101181]

Hello,


I have an asus k8v se deluxe mobo and an 120gb ide and 250 gb sata drive. I remember having an extremely hard time installing the sata disc and I finally managed to get it installed by installing a promise raid sata driver and plugging it up to the primary raid sata port on the mobo. Now I have another sata and plugging it up to the via sata 1 or 2 ports on the mobo doesn't work, and it's not recognized. I can plug it to the secondary raid sata port and it is detected and when I try to define the array it says it will initialize the drive in raid 0 but it will erase the data from the disc(s). Since this seems to be the only way I can install it, if I pick yes to initialize will it erase the data on the primary sata port ( the 250 gig) ? I have 200 gigs worth of stuff I don't want to loose if this doesn't work out. I also tried disabling the primary raid in the bios setting, but the drives weren't detected by the via sata ports. Also when I had the promise raid sata driver enabled and switched to onboard ide operation option it seemed to scan and detect the drive during startup but not when windows loaded. Any ideas on how to get this straightened out? Thanks

[rallynavvie]

You really need to disable the RAID and run those separate, seriously.

[redwudz]

I had that motherboard and always had problems with SATA drives. I gave up and used all PATA drives. I hate to say it, but the VIA K8T800 chipset always seemed problematic.

I'm not a big fan of Promise controller cards either, but they have always seemed to work well enough. Personally, if you have a spare PCI slot, I would pick up a Silicon Image SATA controller card and not bother with the motherboard SATA controller.

I agree about RAID 0 if that's the RAID level you are thinking about. When one drive fails you have two useless drives. Better to just use them separately, IMO. I don't find drive speed much of a limitation compared to CPU and bus speed, at least for video use.