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Old May 29th 04, 01:37 PM
Jan Kalin
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In article GBQtc.10327$eY2.3883@attbi_s02, jpsga wrote:
Well Jan .. your MB was strange to me so I had to look it up. What a nice
board.


I agree Dual processors rock! I'd much rather have two slower
processors than one fast one - the system is responsive even during heavy
calculations.

Since the PDC20276 will not give you what want, please consider the
HighPoint RocketRAID 133
It will handle RAID 0+1.


Yes, I did some more research and found out that the whole thing is
actually my fault for not having thoroughly read the board documentation.
It says that RAID 0 and RAID 1 are supported, but says nothing about RAID
0+1. Additionally the controler itself doesn't support 0+1, so no ammout
of BIOS hackery will enable that.

Thank you for the suggestion, but I have decided to go with Promise
Fasttrak TX2000 controler that I can pick up from a store on Monday,
whilst I'd have to order and wait for the HighPoint controller. The
reviews for TX2000 seem very good and coupled with 4 Maxtor DiamondMax
Plus 9 ATA133 and a 66MHz bus I should get 266MB/s transfer speeds.

The mother board manual indicated that you can boot from this add-on board.


Actually I'll keep the system disk as it is and leave it as a separate
non-RAID disk. I don't keep anything important on the system disk and have
a habit of wiping and reinstalling OS periodically (to make up for the
deficient uninstalls of various programs that I test). So I prefer having
a "standalone" smallish system disk that I can wipe at any time and
separate disks for data.

As I am sure you know, setting up the controller is done at boot time. After
the BIOS looks at your VGA BIOS it finds and executes the RAID BIOS. You
enter and set-up the 1+0. Some how you must partition and format the drives.
That is o/s dependent.


I can get to the RAID BIOS interface and set up the array, but the "lite"
version of the controler allows only one array containing only two drives.
The other pair is then used as two separate drives. I haven't yet
installed drivers for NT, because I want to get the low-level part right
before offering the new drives to NT.

Anyway, thanks for suggestions.

Cheers, Jan

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