i have an epox 8k5a motherboard, 2 hard drives, a DVD drive and a CD writer. My primary hard drive is connected to IDE 1. I connect my secondary drive to IDE 2. The other 2 drives are on the same cable which is connected to IDE 3. I don't want to use the same cable for both hard drives but it seems i can only use IDE 1 and 2. Consequently i have to swap the hard drive with the cd/dvddiscs which is a pain. Why can't i use the other IDE slots? also with this setup i have chassis fan, case fan and cpu fan, are more fans neccessary for 2 hard drives? thanks for time spent answering . . .
Okay, with extra IDE controllers which typically include RAID functions, only hard drives are guaranteed to work--much less recommended. Put the hard drives on these ones (do make sure to install the drivers for the HighPoint HPT372 controller first before making a switch or install them during the Windows setup--if you're using WinNT/2k/XP). Try the hard drives on the IDE ports noted as "RAID" which I believe are the red ports closer to the bottom of the board. Other things to make sure of are that the HPT372 controller is enabled (if you don't see something about a controller scanning for disks, it's not enabled) in BIOS or with a jumper---I believe Epox will have this control within BIOS. 2nd, get into the HPT372 BIOS by hitting [Ctrl]-H while the controller is scanning. From there, make sure to set which drive the system will boot from. Try that, and see if that doesn't fix things up
sorry its been a while, i've had net problems. ok the only thing i havn't tried is putting both drives on the red slots so i'll try this as soon as i have chance. i've always had the highpoint controller. u say it is not recommened to use red slots for raid but their is no other alternative - no? thanks 4 your suggestions
You can use them for hard drives only. You don't have to use RAID (I don't)--but you can't use CD-ROMs or anyother optical or non hard drive IDE device (i.e. Zip, LS-120). Unless your hard drives are the exact same make and model (preferrably), it's not a really good idea to use RAID since the levels of RAID available with the controller aren't much and will leave useless space on the larger of the 2 drives. RAID is fine on the highpoint controller, but for all the hype, IDE RAID that comes on motherboards isn't all that. A high end card with a separate processor and memory on the the card itself are the real winners if disk speed is what you crave. It doesn't mean the controllers are useless. I try to put each drive on it's own channel, as IDE can only access one drive per channel at a time.
thanx man - youre absolutely right. I put both hard discs on red ide slots (3,4) and everything was detected. Its strange though cos this is the opposite of what it says to do in my raid manual (ie use ide 1,2). so in configuration utility i set the boot disc and thought i'd leave setting up raid until i'd arranged the data on the drives. well it crashed, blue screen, windows shut down etc - could the reason be that i didn't actually set up raid? Im running both discs now on ide1/2 with no booting problems. Ok and lastly, raid 0, or 0+1 destroy all data on the discs unless use create and duplication operation. But they destroy everything, irrespective of partitions or what?
RAID 0 basically makes your hard drives appear as one big drive or 2x whatever the smallest size is of the two (why you want same sized drives for any type of RAID) since half the data of anything will be on one drive, if any drive goes out, so does your data. I'm not sure even data recovery services can recover your data at that point. RAID 1 simply mirrors one drive onto another. If one drive goes down...big fat deal, you've still got the same setup on a different disk ready to go. RAID 0 +1 uses at least 4 hard drives: 2 sets in RAID 0--one for your data, one to mirror that config. There are other levels of RAID, but on the RAID controllers you have integrated on motherboards, this is the max you get. Controllers with advanced RAID options can get as pricey as several thousand dollars.
ok, i see how it works but should it not be possible to have? ide 1 CDROM + dvd drive ide 2 idle ide 3 hard drive 1 ide 4 hard drive 2 Not actually configured to raid, just 2 independant hard drives. When i tried this it crashed to blue screen.
sorry i forgot to mention when i was running both discs on ide1,2 the cd/dvd drives wern't detected on any other slot - hence the problem . . .
Did you install the HPT372 driver prior to moving the hard drives to the HPT controller? If you didn't, that's your problem.
That depends on your particular board. Look in the bios settings where you enable the onboard raid, and see if you can choose RAID, or ATA/100,133 when you enable it. I have not owned a board that had a Highpoint controller that you could use as standard ATA (non RAID). I could be wrong here, but I have never owned one. The only board (there could be more... I just haven't used them), that is full featured, is most of the Gigabyte boards, they do not use the Promise Lite controller, but actually the full featured one, and I can chose disabled/enabled, RAID/ATA133 as choices, and it also handles ATAPI devices, CDROM, DVD, etc.
