Mixing drives on a RAID controller?

[DeaconFrost]

I'm going to get my server online this week, hopefully, but I have one question. I was planning to set the SATA controller on the Intel 965 board to RAID mode, and use three hard drives in RAID5. Will I still be able to use an SATA optical drive on this system, or should I switch back to an older IDE optical drive, to avoid problems? I'll be putting Windows Server 2008 on it.

 

[Sojuuk]

i was just about to ask the same thing. I'll wait and see what people say ^_^

 

[xenotype]

If it were me, depending on the make/model RAID card, id probably offload the bandwidth back to the motherboard, so as to not experience slow downs when moving stuff back /forth between a cd/dvd to the array.

 

[DeaconFrost]

I don't plan on using the DVD drive very often, if at all, once the system is up and running. It basically would be used in the event I might need to burn a quick OS DVD or something like that....also maybe to occasionally archive old photo directories and such.

 

[xenotype]

I don't plan on using the DVD drive very often, if at all, once the system is up and running. It basically would be used in the event I might need to burn a quick OS DVD or something like that....also maybe to occasionally archive old photo directories and such.

go for it then. shouldnt pose any problems.

 

[EnderW]

what kind of problems would you expect to have? bandwidth limitation on the controller?

 

[DeaconFrost]

Mainly booting issues, and other bootable utilities not detecting the optical or hard drives, such as when using DOS utilities with a controller set to AHCI. Any former desktop RAID controllers I've used in years past have always said not to use optical drives on them, hence the questioning now.

 

[Michael Daly]

The Intel ICHx Raid controllers don't seem to have any problem mixing RAID and non-RAID drives. I've been running two in RAID1 plus one non-RAID for a long time.

Be careful messing with the drives when set up with RAID and using a utility that sets it to AHCI - Intel doesn't guarantee the results of swapping this setting (it will BSOD in Windows) and I recently experienced a major outage due to using a utility that might have done exactly this (I don't know for sure and am not willing to repeat the "experiment").