More then 1 Raid

[Deke09]

Hi,

On my mobo I have 6 sata ports (blue), the last 2 ports (4/5) can be setup in IDE mode, which I use for backup drive and DVD.

Will I be able to have 2 raids setup? say like my 2 ssd's on ports 0/1 in RAID 0 and 2 raptors on 2/3 as aother RAID 0?

Cause reading reviews on the Gsata Raid (white ports), it's like slower then using windows 7 software raid, or has this been improved?

Thanks,
Deke

[Psycho101]

You can RAID 0 two separate lots of drives on a single 6 port ICH10R without problem, but I'm not sure about using an AMD southbridge. Any idea what "brand" the RAID controller is? I don't know if AMD use their own SB as a controller or use a 3rd party. I hear Marvell being mentioned a lot for AMD RAID devices.

It's certainly possible to set up two arrays in the controller BIOS as desired and the ICH SHOULD happily run them seperately.

This is true for RAID0, but I'm not sure if mixing RAID types is OK. I assume a raid 0 OS (2-4 drives)and a RAID 1 data (2 drives) array are possible too.

What Brand and model are your SSD's? Bear in mind that if they're current gen they could be pumping out upwards of 400MB/s reads as a RAID pair. An ICH10R has a max throughput of about 650MB/s, regardless of how many drives are on the controller and I assume your controller will have some kind of hard limit too.. Shouldn't be an issue for you as standard Raptors will only pump data through at about ~120MB/s in a RAID pair maximum. Velociraptors may, along with the SSD's, saturate the bus though.

[Deke09]

What Brand and model are your SSD's?

They're Corsair CMFSSD-32D1 Extreme Series.

The raptors are the old first original raptors at sata1, but in raid 0 they still beat a single sata2 drive.

Considering how cheap new sata2 drives are nowadays, maybe i should just see if anyone wants to buy these?

Well I kind of thought I'd be able to have 2 raid's without having to use the gigabyte raid.

Thanks again Psycho101, you been a great help! :)
Deke

[Psycho101]

Good luck getting them up and running.

You could sell those Raptors on eBay for a decent amount. Hopefully someone wanting to expand a RAID array may buy them.

As you say, SATA mechanical disks are cheap now. You will find a lot of current SATA drives do actually get extremely close to two Raptors in RAID. I can recommend a WD6400AAKS (WD Caviar Blue /SE16). I used one asan OS drive until I got my SSD and it was night and day compared to my old 2 x WD2000JS in RAID 0. Even the 1TB Black version is quite rrasonably priced. If using the SSD's for most of your programs though, the Blue versions are fine. Avoid the WD Green range. They only spin at 5200RPM and are slow in comparison to the Blue/Black. All that speed loss to save a mere 4-5W.