Hello all! I have a slew of questions for you that I hope I can get answers to!! I plan on purchasing the Gigabyte 8INXP for the new PC I am building as soon as I can find one in stock at a reasonable price. There are two issues I am not sure of that I was hoping I could get some professional input on.
First, what is the best way for me to use the ATA 133 RAID with the following setup? I have 2 Maxtor 120 GB ATA 133 drives and one Maxtor 30 GB ATA 133 drive. I wanted to hook up the 120 gigs to the RAID controller as RAID 0 (striping) and the 30 GB to the primary IDE. Which one should I set as the boot drive? Does it matter? I thought it would be nice to use the smaller drive to boot from and use my two large ones for storage, gaming, swap files, and anything else.
Also, as far as partitioning goes...is this even possible with RAID?? I like to partition my drives for organization and a dual booting, but I'm not sure how to tie this into a RAID setup. Maybe I should purchase another 30GB drive and run those as RAID and put the other two on my primary and secondary IDE's?
Secondly, does the dual channel RAM for this board apply to all 4 banks? I thought I read somewhere it was only for the first two banks, but I could be very mistaken. I have two PC2100 256MB chips to put in it, but I am considering purchasing two more to bring the system up to 1024 total. OH, and that brings up one more question!! The RAM I have now is PNY, should I buy more PNY to match or go for something more high end like Crucial or Corsair? Does the memory also have to support dual channel to work correctly with this board or is dual channel support all in the board?
Any help is greatly appreciated since I am a first time builder as you can probably tell. I'm sorry to flood with so many questions but I want to make sure I get this pc right the first time. I also appologize if this is in the wrong forum, I didn't see another that quite fit.
Cheers,
Mcurphy