nVidia NFornce 4 Ultra Raid Questions

[User]

Coming up I'm going to be switching to a raid setup and I need to plan out exactly what I'm going to do so I don't have to buy drives over and over. Support will be done through the on board nVidia chip which is a nforce 4 ultra. I understand that for a 0+1 setup you need two drives. Also the nVidia chip will span the array across pata and sata. However I've never setup raid using nvidias chip so before I buy drives I want to be sure I can do what I'd like to.

Is it possible to assign two pata drives together and two sata drives in order to keep performance up on one drive? For instance, all media (music, movies, games, etc.) be on the sata and operating systems be on the pata drives. Second is partitioning possible on raid drives with nvidia? most importantly because I plan on doing multiple boots with windows and *nix. I don't see why not but don't want to spend the time having to redo things. Thanks much.

 

[drizzt81]

Coming up I'm going to be switching to a raid setup and I need to plan out exactly what I'm going to do so I don't have to buy drives over and over. Support will be done through the on board nVidia chip which is a nforce 4 ultra. I understand that for a 0+1 setup you need two drives.

no, you will need 4 drives at least for RAID 0+1 or RAID 10.

Is it possible to assign two pata drives together and two sata drives in order to keep performance up on one drive?

yes, you can set up arrays that are only on PATA and only on SATA. Whether or not this will impact performance, I do not know

Second is partitioning possible on raid drives with nvidia?

yes, it is possible to partition a RAID-array just like any other disk.

most importantly because I plan on doing multiple boots with windows and *nix. I don't see why not but don't want to spend the time having to redo things. Thanks much.

Well, if you have the correct drivers for Linux then they should be able to read the drive just like Windows, so there shouldn't be a problem. It all depends on how nVidia implemented their drivers.

 

[RavenD]

A raid 0+1 setup requires 4 drives, not two. Raid 1 and Raid 0 need only two.

 

[User]

good to know tha 0+1 will need 4 drives. nVidias site is a bit vauge on their info so I was trying to remember what I had read from other sites, guess I didn't remember that well lol. Thanks for the help guys.