Problems running 2 250gb hard drives with xp pro?

DanGDanG I AM CANADIAN Icrontian
edited April 2005 in Hardware
I'm gearing up for the boxing day sales and am hoping to get a pair of WD 250GB se's for cheap tomorrow or the day after.
I'm going to be running them off a promise ata card that they say will support LBA 48bit larger than 137gb as long as I have the newest bios for the card, which is not a problem to do, it's more so windows that I'm concerned with.
Xp pro, with SP1. Any problem getting it to see the full capacity of the 2 drives?

Comments

  • Geeky1Geeky1 University of the Pacific (Stockton, CA, USA)
    edited December 2003
    None whatsoever.

    I've got 4 160GB hard drives in my dual 2500 system, and they're in 2, 2-drive RAID 0 arrays; each array has a formatted capacity of ~310GB, and Win XP sees all 310GB just fine.
  • Geeky1Geeky1 University of the Pacific (Stockton, CA, USA)
    edited December 2003
    Oh, by the way... if you can spend the $$, get 4 of them. Not so much for the size as the speed... RAID them, like I've done, and I'd expect similar performance.

    What kind of performance? My 160GB Maxtor (DMax 9s, ATA-133/7200RPM/8MB on SATA adapters) arrays hit >100MB/s sustained reads and writes in ATTO.
  • DanGDanG I AM CANADIAN Icrontian
    edited December 2003
    Mmm, aren't they pretty....

    merry%20christmas%20to%20me.jpg
  • ketoketo Occupied. Or is it preoccupied? Icrontian
    edited December 2003
    Damn..nice.
  • profdlpprofdlp The Holy City Of Westlake, Ohio
    edited December 2003
    Just make sure you have SP1 installed. After that, you're golden.

    I think half the members of S-M are turning green with envy right now!

    :vimp:
  • TemplarTemplar You first.
    edited December 2003
    :wow2:
  • ginipigginipig OH, NOES
    edited December 2003
    Geeky1, which raid controller do you recommend? Price-wise, or Quality-wise?
  • Geeky1Geeky1 University of the Pacific (Stockton, CA, USA)
    edited December 2003
    I don't have a great deal of experience with different RAID cards... Tex would be able to answer your question better than I could, I think.

    However, I'm happy with my HighPoint RocketRaid 1540.
  • ginipigginipig OH, NOES
    edited December 2003
    who's tex?
  • fudgamfudgam Upstate New York
    edited December 2003
    How much they cost you?
  • ThraxThrax 🐌 Austin, TX Icrontian
    edited December 2003
    Tex is S-M's god of RAID.
  • ginipigginipig OH, NOES
    edited December 2003
    For some reason, I can't PM him. Oh well.

    If it's ok with you, I'd like to leech some info from you :)

    I'm considering getting 2x ~37gb Wd Raptors soon. I know my mobo will support it, and my psu has 2 Sata connectors. Currently I'm using those 2 WD's in my sig, in no particular raid setup.

    How should I go about connecting the raptors, considering my mobo? I'd like to install Windows XP Pro (and later SP1) on it, and I was wondering if the setup of XP is any different - i.e hitting function keys and so on?

    The reason I'm asking, is because I don't know much on this topic, and I'd really hate to trash my entire setup simply because I gave raid arrays a go.
  • ThraxThrax 🐌 Austin, TX Icrontian
    edited December 2003
    I'm terrible at RAID arrays.
  • ginipigginipig OH, NOES
    edited December 2003
    Oh, and I forgot to mention:

    If I were to get 2 extra ide drives (different size compared to my 120gb WD's) in the future, will this mess up my raid setup?
  • ginipigginipig OH, NOES
    edited December 2003
    ewww
  • ginipigginipig OH, NOES
    edited December 2003
    1 minute apart posts :(
  • ketoketo Occupied. Or is it preoccupied? Icrontian
    edited December 2003
    Setting up RAID array in WinXP setup is a matter of hitting "F6" when it asks if you want to install third party RAID drivers, then inserting a floppy (ya, the only way to do it is floppy AFAIK) when prompted a minute later.

    Yes, you can add IDE drives later without affecting your RAID array. Assuming, that is, you're just running them as 'normal' IDE drives on the PCI bus. Or a third party controller I suppose.
  • DanGDanG I AM CANADIAN Icrontian
    edited December 2003
    fudgam wrote:
    How much they cost you?

    They were $376 each after tax but before rebate in Canadian $$, then throw in a $100 US mail in rebate, and that's ~$230 or so each. I couldn't argue. now I can sell off my mass of smaller 40-80gb drives and just run a couple of large ones.

    ginipig, my Raptor has both connectors, the legacy one and the new style, unlike the seagate ones that only have the new style.
  • ginipigginipig OH, NOES
    edited December 2003
    Thanks for the reply Keto. :rockon:

    Well, I did a quick search on a7n8x-deluxe + raid arrays, and it seems that a lot of people have had trouble with converters.

    Results: RocketRAID404, Raptors (using onboard) with OS, and PATA for misc (using controller).
  • dak125dak125
    edited December 2003
    Looks good DanG. I don't know if I'd be able to get used to seeing the word 'disque' on a hard drive box :usflag:.

    And in response to raid cards, I picked mine up for $13 off ebay. The setup was different than I expected but worked wonderfully nonetheless. I could not, for the life of me, press F6 during Setup. I had to continue into the setup until it asked me for a mass storage device driver (or something similar to that) then I threw in the floppy disk I had to make (it only came with a CD). But, I can't complain with the card.
  • scotchfxscotchfx Austin, TX
    edited April 2005
    Granted I'm replying to a thread that's 2+ years old but it's the only hit I get on Google for my prob description...

    I've got a pair of Maxtor Diamondmax9 250GB SATA drives running off of a RAID_1 mirrored partition on my Highpoint 1540 RocketRAID PCI card. I'm not sure if my sig is up to date so here it is just in case:

    2 x AMD Opteron 248 (2.2GHz)
    MSI K8T Master2-FAR / Award v1.1 BIOS
    2 GB of TwinX1024RE-3200LLPT (4 x 512MB)
    2 x 74GB WD Raptor (*XP boot* RAID_0 on VT8237)
    Highpoint RocketRAID 1540 PCI card
    2 x 250GB Maxtor Diamondmax9 (RAID_1 on HPT1540)
    80GB Western Digital (*SuSE boot* IDE2 port)
    Sapphire Atlantis Radeon 9700 128MB (AGP 8x)
    Enermax EG651P-VEFM (550W 24-pin ATX PSU)
    Lian-Li PC-69 Aluminum Mid-Tower Case
    WinXP SP2 and all critical updates

    Whenver I try to transfer data to the HPT1540 RAID_1 partition XP freezes up on me. I've tried reinstalling/updating the drivers, reinstalling XP proper, repartitioning the drives - I've even run memtest86+ on my DDR, but no luck.

    I've had the partition up for awhile but I haven't really been using it since I was waiting until I had SuSE running to format it FAT32 (so both XP and Linux can access it) however in trying to narrow the breadth of this problem I've since formated the 80GB SuSE partition (Linux is no longer on my desktop - I did this when I decided to reinstall XP).

    Any ideas as to what might be the problem?

    I made it 99% of the way through a re-format (full, not quick) in XP, but I made the mistake of backgrounding it and playing an mpeg - the moment I started this everything froze up. Prior to this, whenever I tried to copy any remotely sizeable chunk of data (say 500+ MBs) XP would freeze regardless if I was doing anything.

    HELP!!!

    please?
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