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What are my setup options?

P

paradoxblue

Gawd
Joined
Jan 4, 2006
Messages
591
Well I have 4 ide hard drives. lets start with the mobo

i have a A8N-SLI deluxe. rather popular on here heh.
My OS drive is running win xp pro corp sp2 blah blah etc etc.
- it is a seagate SATA 120 gig hard drive. running on channel 1 of the red sata ports. leaving 7 blank. yay. so room for expansion :D

Now the four drives I have are:
3x250 gig maxtors (one is a brand new one bought today hasnt even been formatted. the other two are older onces that are both empty now.
1x300 gig which is fulls o ic ant format/whipe it :( Well maybe if its my only option.

All four of the above drives are IDE. I have all my ide channels open and i am considering buyign a pci card or two to run my dual dvd burners.

What are my setup options? I would love to have one large 1TB drive. is this possible? power isnt a problem. cooling is great.

What do i have for options. I'd love to keep my buying options to a minimum heh. but i do need a method eto hook up two aditional IDE dvd burners.

any advice would be great I'm painting my new case tomorow and hoping to do all this on the weekend. i MAY even format and install win xp MCE for my 360's sake :)

:confused:

thanks!

EDIT:
i came accross this. will one of these host all four of my drives in what looks like one? silicon image is good right?
http://cgi.ebay.com/Ultra-Silicon-I...ryZ41995QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem
 
As an eBay Associate, HardForum may earn from qualifying purchases.
i would never buy any type of electronic hardware off of ebay, no matter how good the seller's rating is. from what i can tell, you want a spanned volume over your 4 drives. im not sure how to do this myself, but i do know of how to use your 4 drives seperately. i run a siig in 1 of my computers and have had no issues in the 3 years i've had it. you should be able to span this in Disk Management. i have never done it, so i cannot say for sure.
 
i know how to uset he 4 dries seperetly. i have done that before. if im thinking of wut your thinking...

i saw something in disk manager that i need to investigate more so. about spanning them. guess I will wait till i have the case redone to find out heh. unless someone posts more info for me :)
 
Protias is referring to dynamic disk spanning or software raid. That is an option.

Couple things to consider... You will loose 50GB by adding the 300 in an array with the 250s. The card you linked to will get the job done if you go level 0. Problem being if you loose 1 disk or your controller takes a dive all your data is gone. A card that can do JBOD might be a better option. I'd probably end up with,

300GB - C:
3 x 250GB (750GB) JBOD or level 0 array - D:
120GB - E:

via installing the controller card, building the array in your existing setup. Copy your data over from the 300 that you dont want to loose on wipe. Unplug everything except the 300, format/reinstall windows then reconnect the array and the 120. Just one of many options you have with that number of drives...
 
i dont understand why i'd use my ide 300 as my c drvie. i dont need 300 gigs on C.

the 3 250's i'd like to raid im not over concerned about the shit on it i plant o buiold a SATA redundtant setup sooner or later. I'm liooking at this winblows software raid stuff now. hmm trying to decide how to set it up :D
 
paradoxblue said:
i dont understand why i'd use my ide 300 as my c drvie. i dont need 300 gigs on C.
Click to expand...

Performance and no loss of capacity. That 300 is likely faster than your other drives and adding it to a level 0 array will reduce it to 250.
 
no i woudl think the 120 with sata would be faster then the 300 on ide would it not? if not i will simply find a faster sata drive. like.. a raptor or something i dont wanna keep my ide's as os drives.
 
well, you can always partition your 300gb drive to 10gb and the rest as storage. sata should be faster though, as transfer rates are 150 for sata 1 and 300 for sata 2. your ide's are probably ata 100, so your transfer rates are at 100.
 
protias said:
well, you can always partition your 300gb drive to 10gb and the rest as storage. sata should be faster though, as transfer rates are 150 for sata 1 and 300 for sata 2. your ide's are probably ata 100, so your transfer rates are at 100.
Click to expand...
A simplistic form of putting it, anyway.

The bus supports 100-133MB/s. The drives themselves only put out, say, 60MB/s. If two drives are speaking at the same time, then all is well, and the bus is being fully utilized. If three drives need to speak, that's where the limitation comes into play. From what I understand, using JBOD, it's highly unlikely that more than two drives (OS and whichever data drive you're writing to) will ever be used simultaniously, vs. RAID-0, where all drives in the array are being used.

My recommendation would be to purchase a card that supports JBOD, and (if it's possible) JBOD based on partitions, not drives. Then, you could have a 1TB JBOD setup, and 50GB left over for your OS.


i jsut ofudn these
http://www.satacables.com/html/sata-acessories.html

wodnering if they will help me since i have 7 open sata ports. lol and would like to have my 3 dvdroms running also :)
Click to expand...
They will allow you to put your drives on the SATA channel, but may not help with their speeds. A friend of mine picked up an IDE-SATA converter, and his IDE drive would not run in any mode other than ATA-33. Assuming it works fine with your drives, and your motherboard, most onboard chipsets support JBOD, so it could, in theory, save you from purchasing a controller card and using bulky cables. However, you would still need to purchase four of those devices.
 
yeah. see i have 3 dvd-roms. 1 reader. two burners. and then the 4 hdd's. im not sure if i run the adaptor sont he hdd's if ic an then use my mother boards onboard RAID and such? or maybe iw ill leave them ont he two ide channels and then use the adaptors to make my burners sata. its not for speed i want them for more connections haha.

i will look into jbod. recomendations? i'd liek to have all four of the large drives raided.
 
well, from what i've read from unhappy_mage before, unless you're doing more than raid 0, dont use the onboard controllers. he knows a lot more about raid than i. im trying to learn more by reading everything here.
 
protias said:
well, from what i've read from unhappy_mage before, unless you're doing more than raid 0, dont use the onboard controllers. he knows a lot more about raid than i. im trying to learn more by reading everything here.
Click to expand...
Mage is a wise man. If he said that, I'd listen.

A note: Some of those adapters have issues with optical drives.
 
ok i have jsut aquired. for lack of a better word. 3 80 gig maxtor serial drives. identical drives..

I'm wodnering if i use my onboard wuts the best redundancy/backup i can use. ic ould get a 4th if needed. since the mobo has four red ports im wondering can i run two 80's togethor. so they make 160 split. to make the speed faster then have them redundant to two other 80's??

or would just running the two 80's one ghosting the other be speed enough and safe enough>? i want my os drive safe as hell :)
 
TeeJayHoward said:
Mage is a wise man. If he said that, I'd listen.

A note: Some of those adapters have issues with optical drives.
Click to expand...


after reading more into wut im using my 3 opticals for. i've decided i wont need all three a simply burner willw ork i plan to purchase a dvd duplicator for the other drives to suit my purpose :) and goignt o install a top 120mm blow hole i think.
 
TeeJayHoward said:
Mage is a wise man. If he said that, I'd listen.
Click to expand...
But hopefully disagree if it didn't make sense. It's one thing to listen to what I have to say, it's another to take it as gospel. I love being proved wrong :D

paradoxblue: Good luck with the mod! I suggest using a single drive as the OS drive, then Ghost it to another, and re-image it every so often, as necessary. Take the Ghost drive offline most of the time - maybe get an enclosure for it? Use the third drive as data storage.

 
yeah im thinking about simply doing one drive as my os and jsut making a ghost of it for later use. hmmm

i set up the 4x80's in a raid 5 array. i love it :D
 
maybe u guys can help. im stuck on hwo to get my nvidia Raid drivers to install. it wants me to insert floppy. so i assume ther eboot disks. must i isntall these on a fresh winblows install? and when do i do so?
 
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