New to raid just new help

[amdmadman]

Will here it is. I have Never built a raid array so this will be me first one.

1. I have a MSI motherboard with built in raid controller.
Should I A. use the on board controller our buy a PCI controller.
(mother is the brand new via 333 chipset one the ultra one)

2. IF I USE THE ON BOARD CONTROLLER there are two ide ports does each harddrive get its own channel our do i set it up like A stanard IDE setup with a master and a slave. ( i will be using raid 0)

3. do all cables support ata 133 our do i have to buy differant ide calbles

Thanks Mike

[Darthtanion]

Welcome aboard amdmadman. :)
Damn... try typing that fast three time

1- I'm not familiar with MSI, but chances are very good that your board is either using the Promise or Highpoint RAID controllers. While the Highpoint is reputedly better, both will easily get the job done.

2- Yes, you'll want to put one hard drive on each channel, and then you'll need to set up the RAID capabilities from within your motherboard's BIOS or RAID configuration screen. Some mainboards have a separate RAID Configuration Utility that works independently from the BIOS itself.

3- The 80-wire cables (referred to as ATA100 cables by most... has one blue end) will work for your new hard drives.

Good luck, and let us know how things go. :D

[JediAgent]

MSI's controller for that board is the newer Promise (2nd best, my opinion, to highpoints 133) and does support ATA133 RAID. The cables you got (80 wire blue end) are exactly what you need, and having two to put a HDD on each channel is best. You can run them on one channel, but to my knowledge that can be slowere as both run data throu one lmited cable. Best to just spend the 15 bucks and do it right. RAID is very cool, and i think you'll be happy with the performance when you get it setup. Just put it all together physically (drives in bays and cables hooked up) and go to the RAID config screen. Mine is after the bios right before start-up device finding (i.e. that time when you press a key to start on a cd) There you can build a RAID 0 config. After doing that, your PC should recognize both drives as one faster drive. Install Windows and everything else from there. Have fun and do keep us updated.

Oh yeah, i dont have your board, im just telling you what my experience is like. The RAID screen could be in the BIOS, i could be after, figure it out, thats half the fun.