Resubmitted after 23 hours.....

At 09:42 AM 4/20/2002 -0500, you wrote:
>I have a Gigabyte GA-81RXP raid board. How do I hook up (1)harddrive, (1)
>DVD, (1) CDRW, and (1) nec zip drive? Can I set them all up as master
>drives on their own controlers? If so how would I go about this?

Hi Bud...

I just finished a Credit Union network job with this motherboard as the
server. I believe you mean the GA-8irxp (lower case letter used to
delineate between the i and the 1). I had a bit of a problem getting
Windows 2000 server installed on this until I got the latest RAID drivers
from the website... so you may want to check that out before you install
any OS on it.

How you set it up all depends on what you want as a final result. Looking
at your hardware list, here would be my suggestion...

HD - Master on Primary IDE
Zip Drive - Slave on Primary IDE
DVD - Master on Secondary IDE
CDRW - Slave on Secondary IDE

(Note: master/slave on same IDE cable for the cdrom drives is a whole
different topic of discussion... but I've always had the reader as master
and the RW as slave on the same cable and have had no ill effect)

Because you have no need for RAID, right now, I'd stay away from it. To get
it to boot from a RAID drive, you would have to disable the Primary IDE and
select IDE3 as the primary boot device. Then... depending on which type of
array you'll be setting up (stripping or mirroring) you'd have to place the
mirrored drives as both masters on RAID1 and 2 and use the slaves on RAID 1
and 2 for either stripping or separate drives all together. (I'm not too
sure, but I think you can have both types of arrays on that board... I
remember seeing something about that in the "updated" manual from the
website. BTW... my board was screenprinted wrong on the RAID id's. The
board, printed manual and the .pdf manual on the cdrom show that the
Primary raid controller is the upper one of the two... which in fact, it is
the bottom socket. I cleared out an XP Pro install when I went to copy the
drive while building the array.

Once you get more hard drives, you can start thinking about using the RAID
capabilities of that board. Then, is it security you want? (mirroring) or
performance (stripping). In my honest view... I see no reason for
stripping, as it's too easy for one of those drives to go bad and lose
everything. But a combination of stripping and mirroring may be a happy
medium... but then we're talking a lot of cash in drives.

Volkard Linke

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