need help with AMD's raid controller!

[SirGameAlot]

Hello,

I have an Microstar K7T Turbo VIA KT133A chipset motherboard. This has the onboard RAID controller on it.
I have the following questions :

1.Is it hard to set up properly (bios, windows, control panel, ...???)
2.How do I configure everything
3.Are these two disks OK for using the RAID controller

Maxtor 30.7 GB ATA100 7200rpm
Maxtor 30.7 GB ATA100 5400rpm

I knew I had to have two disk of the same size but dont know if they have to be the same speed??

Well thats it, if anyone knows anything about these it would be great.

Thx in advance

 

[readysetgo]

^ bump

 

[Demon-Xanth]

Might try re-titling it something like "K7T Turbo raid controller help". AMD doesn't make a raid controller afaik.

 

[FluxCapacitor]

Those drives will work, but you won't be getting the full potential out of your 7200rpm drive by RAIDing it with a slower 5400rpm model. You would almost be better off running them individually.

If you really want to RAID them together, just go into the RAID controller's BIOS (usually selectable during boot-up), select both drives in the menu, and tell the controller to set them up in an array. Then specify the stripe size (64k is standard usually), and you're good to go. Then you just partition the "new" drive with fdisk and format it as you would a normal drive. RAID 0 (striping) is for pure speed with no data redundancy (array size will = about 60GB). RAID 1 (mirroring) is for data redundany with no real speed improvement (array size will = about 30GB). RAID 0+1 is a combination of RAID 0 and RAID 1, but may require you to use 4 hard drives.

Be advised though that you will LOSE ALL INFORMATION currently stored on either drive. Sorry, but there's no way around that. In addition, if either one of your drives fails in a RAID 0 configuration, will you lose all the info stored on both drives, as there will be no way to restore the information stored on the good drive.

Give it a try. You might want to format your 7200rpm drive alone and set it up on a standard IDE channel then benchmark it, then RAID both drives together and benchmark the RAID array to see if you get a performance increase or not.

I currently run a RAID 0 array with 2 40GB IBM 60GXPs, and I definately see a performance boost from what I did over running one drive by itself. The difference isn't always huge, but there is an increase.

SiSoft Sandra 2001 has a (albiet cheesy) hard drive benchmark. Whereas a single one of my IBM drives scores from 18000 to 20000 points, my RAID 0 array scores 38000 to 40000. Does that mean anything? You be the judge...

 

[Mday]

yup, amd does not make a raid controller, nor anything related to raid afaik

 

[shathal]

I think the north-bridge is about as close as they get to it. And even so, there's a few components in between that .

South-bridge, RAID-controller chips, etc.

As such, AMD don't do RAID - at all, to the best of my knowledge .