ATA 133 RAID card help [Archive] - Techwarelabs Community

revolve

12-14-2002, 10:29 PM

Hi,
Someone pls help to advice to install PCI ATA 133 RAID card.
How do I connect this card?
There's 2 IDE connector on the card, where do i connect this IDE connector to? To the harddisk or motherboard?
i juz bought a 40 gb Maxtor harddisk and need to install window 98 from fresh.
Cheers!

Uranium-235

12-14-2002, 10:36 PM

The card goes in your PCI slot, and the hard drive cable connects to the connector on the PCI card. It probably comes with a driver disk (probably has a directory that says like 98se or 98 on it to specify the operaing system)

Omega

12-16-2002, 10:56 PM

If you're going to use the RAID feature of this controller card, you need two hard drives of the same size (they really should be the exact same hard drive model, and whatnot). I'm guessing the card has its own BIOS, which you'll use to create a RAID array.

You put the card in your PCI slot (as Uranium-235 said), and then connect the two hard drives to the card (one on each IDE connector). Then, when you're booting your computer, something should show up "Blah blah blah RAID controller" "Press <Ctrl F> to enter the RAID utility" (or something to that nature...not necessarily Ctrl F either). Once you're in there, there should be an option to create/build a new array.

It's safe to assume the controller supports RAID 0 and 1. You'll have to decide for yourself what type of array you want. Let the size of each of the two hard drives you used be represented by X. With a RAID 0 array, you'll have a logical drive with a capacity of 2X. Unfortunately, if one of these hard drives dies, you won't lose just X amount of data, you'll lose all 2X of your data. You'll experience theoretical read and write transfer rates double that of a single drive, with the same seek times as a single drive. This type of array is called striping.

With a RAID 1 array, you'll have a capacity of X. In this situation, however, if one of your drives dies, you'll still have all of your data. You can then just buy another hard drive, and rebuild the RAID 1 array. This type of array is called mirroring.