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From: Patty on 12 Aug 2007 20:34
On Sun, 12 Aug 2007 15:04:10 -0700, Bird Janitor� wrote:

> Patty wrote:
>|
>| Is there an advantage to using the PATA adapter and connecting to
>| SATA, other than the usual "get rid of the bulky IDE cable issue"?
>|
>| Yeah, maybe we both need to find something useful to do. ;)
>|
>
> Hi Patty -
>
> Yep, it's that bulky cable thing. You won't get any added speed out of an
> ATA100 drive, regardless of whether or not the SATA channel can go faster.
> The drive's gonna do what the drive's gonna do.
>
> I've been teasing the birds all afternoon, so I guess I found something else
> to do (not that it was really all that useful).
>
> Jef

We've had a few cicada killer wasps move into our yard and they have been
the excitement lately. I'd have preferred that they had moved in somewhere
else than my yard.

Prior to this our excitement was watching the hummingbirds fight at the
feeder.

Geeze, maybe *I* really need to get a life! ;)

Patty
From: Bird Janitor� on 12 Aug 2007 23:19
Patty wrote:
|
| Geeze, maybe *I* really need to get a life! ;)
|

My partner in crime tells me that my life is in a rut.

I tell him "at least it's my rut!"

I'm pretty happy with the way things are.

;-}

Jef


From: Patty on 13 Aug 2007 09:25
On Sun, 12 Aug 2007 20:19:43 -0700, Bird Janitor� wrote:
>
> My partner in crime tells me that my life is in a rut.
>
> I tell him "at least it's my rut!"
>
> I'm pretty happy with the way things are.
>
> ;-}
>
> Jef

Heh, heh... we've been talking about the possibility of moving to an area
where my husband can get a job. I told him I had to have broadband
internet or I wasn't going.

As long as my rut includes broadband, I think I'm ok. ;)

Patty
From: andrewstanton on 18 Aug 2007 16:23
Evening chaps,

OK - following Jeffs advice and patty I have managed to get this thing
to boot from optical.I had to ensure a floppy was connected, but
ensure that the ide detected optical drive was 1st, hard drive second
and floppy third. If the floppy was not present then it started to
boot from cd and died.... If the floppy was connected to its port,
with no disk and low in boot priority then it worked - WEIRD !!!

I now have two problems:

1. After running system restore my version of windows has deactivated
and despite it being on the same box, Bills finest tells me that it is
a different unit to the one that was originally activated upon... Same
mobo, drives etc... So i will chase with reseller on Monday...

2. More of a concern and weird... I bought this board and the OriginAE
S21T case so I could dispose of my very very crappy and unreliable
Thecus N5200 NAS. I have space for 6 drives on my board and plenty of
room in my case. The only problem is that the Raid0 config on the Abit
board is losing 33% of the disc capacity in raid0 !

So.....

I have four 750gb drives configured as Raid0.

Where has it gone....?

>From the advertised capacity of 750gb on each drive i am down to 695gb
at the outset per disk - thats a loss of 4 x 55gb - 220gb but i
understand and expect this one (bits, bytes, useful sectors etc)

With each drive detected as 695gb free space and following creation of
my RAID0 array I have 2048GB - that is the max that the config utility
can make,...

So - after raid creation I have lost 732GB.... In My unreliable
Thecus unit I ended up with 2604gb.... (not so pants now)

Is this right....?

And lastly - Is it really worth it, instead of raid 0 i may as well
use four independent drives...

I think not....


From: Richard Hopkins on 19 Aug 2007 16:48
<andrewstanton(a)gmail.com> wrote in message...
> If the floppy was not present then it started to boot from cd and
> died.... If the floppy was connected to its port, with no disk and
> low in boot priority then it worked - WEIRD !!!

I've come to this thread a little late, and most of it seems to be Jef and
Patty having a conversation, but on the face of it, behaviour of the sort
you're reporting is either down to incorrect BIOS setup, or, in the case of
an AB9 Pro, an old BIOS. What build are you running? If it's anything older
than 16, upgrade immediately.

> 1. After running system restore my version of windows has deactivated
> and despite it being on the same box, Bills finest tells me that it is
> a different unit to the one that was originally activated upon... Same
> mobo, drives etc... So i will chase with reseller on Monday...

There's little point chasing this with the reseller, nothing they can do.
The problem is Microsoft's all too erratic product activation algorithms.
Just go ahead and reactivate the thing.

> 2. More of a concern and weird...

Not weird at all, totally explicable, once you know what the cause is.

> The only problem is that the Raid0 config on the Abit board is losing
> 33% of the disc capacity in raid0 !

That's because the total capacity of your four disk array is breaching the
2TB Windows partition size limit.

> I have four 750gb drives configured as Raid0.

That's a f*ck of a lot of information to lose if one of them fails. I hope
you have a robust backup strategy!

> Where has it gone....?

See above. The difference between the 750GB advertised capacity and the
695GB per disk formatted capacity is largely explained by the difference
between gigabytes and gibibytes, and the difference between unformatted and
formatted capacity.

> So - after raid creation I have lost 732GB.... In My unreliable
> Thecus unit I ended up with 2604gb.... (not so pants now)

Your Thecus unit didn't suffer from the 2TB partition limit because it was a
stand-alone NAS box. You're now using Windows XP to run a dedicated storage
server. Because of that, you're butting heads with the 2TB limit.

IIRC Vista, under certain circumstances, can get around this, but on the
face of it you'd be better off reconfiguring the storage anyway.

> And lastly - Is it really worth it, instead of raid 0 i may as well
> use four independent drives...

Why the hell are you asking us? When you configured a four disk RAID 0 array
in the first place, one presumes you did it for a reason. What was it?

A four drive stripe array would theoretically give you triffic I/O
performance, but on the other hand if you're networking it, you're probably
gonna be bottlenecked by your LAN bandwidth, so did you ever work the
numbers out *before* you created this array, and actually determine whether
this was the best configuration for your needs?

At the end of the day a four drive RAID 0 array is a high(er) risk strategy
at the best of times, as the loss of a single disk will vanish the entire
contents of the array - hence my comment above asking whether you have a
suitable backup strategy.

It would appear that unless you're in a position to really utilise the
theoretical I/O performance the four drive array is giving you,
reconfiguring as single drives, a pair of stripe arrays, a JBOD or some
combination of all three might give you a more usable system. It'll
certainly eliminate all that wasted capacity.
--


Richard Hopkins
Cardiff, Wales, United Kingdom
(replace nospam with pipex in reply address)

The UK's leading BT-pwned technology reseller www.dabs.com


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