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From: Daniel Prince on 5 Apr 2010 04:28
I am thinking of buying an ASUS M4N78 PRO motherboard. It has six
SATA ports. The manual says that ports five and six must be used in
RAID or AHCI mode. What types of drives can be used in AHCI mode?
What types of drives can NOT be used in AHCI mode? Are there any
Windows XP AHCI drivers?

The manual also says, "Due to chipset limitations, when you set any
of the SATA ports to RAID mode, all SATA ports run at RAID mode
simultaneously."

Does this mean that if you have two drives in a mirrored RAID, you
cannot use any optical drive or any single hard drives on the
motherboard ports? Thank you in advance for all replies.
--
Whenever I hear or think of the song "Great green gobs of greasy
grimey gopher guts" I imagine my cat saying; "That sounds REALLY,
REALLY good. I'll have some of that!"
From: Arno on 5 Apr 2010 07:57
Daniel Prince <neutrino1(a)ca.rr.com> wrote:
> I am thinking of buying an ASUS M4N78 PRO motherboard. It has six
> SATA ports. The manual says that ports five and six must be used in
> RAID or AHCI mode. What types of drives can be used in AHCI mode?
> What types of drives can NOT be used in AHCI mode? Are there any
> Windows XP AHCI drivers?

You have it backwards, the drices do not care, i.e. all work.
The problem here is that (at least on my mainboard), you may
have to use all ports in AHCI if you want ro use the last two.

Win XP AHCI drivers exist, but (it being a stupid MS product)
are not quite easy to install. You see, without AHCI you
cannot install the drivers as XP thinks it does not need them.
With AHCI, XP cannot access the drives, and if your board
is like mine, that means any drive. Pretty braindead.

> The manual also says, "Due to chipset limitations, when you set any
> of the SATA ports to RAID mode, all SATA ports run at RAID mode
> simultaneously."

> Does this mean that if you have two drives in a mirrored RAID, you
> cannot use any optical drive or any single hard drives on the
> motherboard ports? Thank you in advance for all replies.

Possibly. But you should not use mainboard RAID anyways. Better
use software RAID or get a separate RAID controller. You also
should have a spare RAID controller (not needed with software
RAID obviously), if you still want to be able to access you data
in case the RAID controller dies. This does happen in practice.

Arno
--
Arno Wagner, Dr. sc. techn., Dipl. Inform., CISSP -- Email: arno(a)wagner.name
GnuPG: ID: 1E25338F FP: 0C30 5782 9D93 F785 E79C 0296 797F 6B50 1E25 338F
----
Cuddly UI's are the manifestation of wishful thinking. -- Dylan Evans
From: Daniel Prince on 5 Apr 2010 16:22
Arno <me(a)privacy.net> wrote:

>Win XP AHCI drivers exist, but (it being a stupid MS product)
>are not quite easy to install. You see, without AHCI you
>cannot install the drivers as XP thinks it does not need them.
>With AHCI, XP cannot access the drives, and if your board
>is like mine, that means any drive. Pretty braindead.

What if you put the drivers on an IDE (PATA) drive or a USB drive?
--
I don't understand why they make gourmet cat foods. I have
known many cats in my life and none of them were gourmets.
They were all gourmands!
From: Rod Speed on 5 Apr 2010 18:13
Daniel Prince wrote
> Arno <me(a)privacy.net> wrote

>> Win XP AHCI drivers exist, but (it being a stupid MS product)
>> are not quite easy to install. You see, without AHCI you
>> cannot install the drivers as XP thinks it does not need them.
>> With AHCI, XP cannot access the drives, and if your board
>> is like mine, that means any drive. Pretty braindead.

> What if you put the drivers on an IDE (PATA) drive

Doesnt help.

> or a USB drive?

The problem is getting XP to load them from there.


From: Bob Willard on 5 Apr 2010 18:19
Daniel Prince wrote:
> Arno <me(a)privacy.net> wrote:
>
>> Possibly. But you should not use mainboard RAID anyways. Better
>> use software RAID or get a separate RAID controller.
>
> How much CPU time does a software RAID consume compared to an
> inexpensive separate RAID controller? Or does it not really matter
> if you have three or more CPU cores?
> --

RAID0 and RAID1 are pretty light users of CPU time, until you
need to rebuild a RAIDset following a HD replacement. RAID5 does
require more computes during writes. So, I'd be willing to
user software RAID for RAID0/1, but I'd think seriously about
hardware for RAID5/6.
--
Cheers, Bob
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