SATA and P4PE

[ehead]

Hi,
I have been reading over the forums a bit, and have a couple of questions regarding the fasttrack controller and SATA drive setup on P4PE.

Why is it necessary to set up drives as RAID 0+1 with the fasttrack utility ?

Also, is the "information" about the RAID setup kept in the fasttrack BIOS, or actually stored on the disk ? This is sort of a general SCSI question I guess.

I'm just curious if the drive, when setup this way, just has a normal disk structure (MBR, partitions, boot sectors, etc ...), of if there is some other "meta-data" pertaining to the RAID setup that is also stored on the disk ?

This may be important to know if someone wanted to move there SATA drive later to another computer/controller. Is it possible to do this with SATA drives on the P4PE w/o any problem ?

Is the SATA setup on the P4PE as slow as some people have said ?
You think it's a driver problem, or just that the controller is not that great ?
You think it's best to just stick with IDE drives on this board ?

[ehead]

I'm going to post a reply to my own message.


My impression is that it is NOT possible to move a drive setup on the p4pe fasttrack controller to another computer.

A little research has led me to believe that there is no "standard" way of setting up RAID arrays, in the sense that some drives that are a part of a RAID array on one controller cannot just be moved to another controller. If they had standarized this (and just added a RAID signature or something to the drives, just like the MBR standard), and agreed to store the information on the drive, it would be possible, but apparently they didnt.

You can slap any ATA/PC drive on any controller and it can read the partition table and know what to do .... apparently not so for RAID setups.

So ... your SATA drive is basically stuck on your fasttrack controller as far as I can tell, even if you only have 1 SATA drive.
This is because it seems to get this drive to be recognized in windows you have to use the "hack" of creating a RAID 0+1 array.

With normal SATA controllers, I'm assuming you don't have to do this.

I wish we knew whether this is a bug or what ?
As others have stated, my drive shows up in device manager as " scsi drive".
Yes, there is a space.
Only disk manager does not make it available for formatting (it simply doesn't show up ...).
I'm assuming configuring the RAID 0+1 array in the fasttrack BIOS alleviates this ... but at the cost of making the drive useless on other SATA controllers ?

I could be wrong about all this .... does anyone know for sure ?

http://www.short-media.com/forum/arc...p/t-10912.html

[Mark_Venture]

Originally Posted by ehead

...My impression is that it is NOT possible to move a drive setup on the p4pe fasttrack controller to another computer....

I could be wrong about all this .... does anyone know for sure ?

Just my $.02...

When I decided to upgrade my PrimaryPC to my first P4 over a year and half ago, I got the P4PE (Primary PC has been upgraded again since).

While I didn't want to use the hard drives connected to the FastTrak controller as one big array (I wanted JBOD), I had to setup each drive as its own Raid 0+1 for the controller to see and use them.

Since I worked with SCSI raid in the past, I was expecting the FastTrak IDE raid to work the same. The RAID info being stored on the controller and the drive. Moving between different model Raid controllers results in loss of data, etc. But when I upgraded my primary rig from the P4PE board to a P4P800dlx (has VIA IDE Raid controller), I found out that I had no problems moving the drives from the P4PE's Promise FastTrak to the P4P800dlx's VIA 6410 controller WITHOUT doing anything special. No data was lost. No reformat was necessary.

NOTE: this was done with 3 drives (PATA and SATA), each as its own 0+1 array. No array spanned more than ONE Physical drive. I assume that if I had defined two or more of the drives as one arry of either Raid 0 or Raid 1 off the Promise contoller data loss would have occured moving the drives.

Since then I've learned that if I defined a 0+1 array on the single drive, then delete the array in the Promise Fasttrak bios setup, the partitions/data are NOT lost either. For additional expierences of my moving drives/deleting/creating arrys on that board see also... P4PE.. move Pata to Raid controlr?

Also, recently the P4PE moved to its new home in my 3rd PC. The 3rd PC originally had an Abit BX6r2.0 P3 mother board with a single PATA HD. When I dropped in the P4PE board, I attached that drive to the FastTrak controller and defined it as a Raid 0+1 array. Much to my suprise all the partitions and data were intact!!

(Btw, when I do upgrades, Primary PC gets the new stuff, PC2 gets the stuff removed from the Primary PC, PC3 gets the stuff out of PC2, PC3's stuff gets distributed to family who needs it. )

[ehead]

Thanks for the info.
Thats good to know.

I figured if there was any wiggle room it was by setting it up as RAID 0+1 ...
which after all, shouldn't need any elaborate overhead.

The Fasttrack is essentially a RAID ONLY controller.
Many RAID controllers (my adaptec e.g.) can also operate as just a "regular" controller too, and no configuration is needed.
Almost none of them can handle CD/DVD/ATAPI though.

But then, hey ... I always looked at this on board RAID on the P4PE as just a bonus anyway.

I can't wait till SATA II becomes popular.
Soon the average computer will have GB ethernet, 64 bit PCI and processors, and a Terabyte of storage on SATA II drives. I give it 2 years.

[Mark_Venture]

Originally Posted by ehead

The Fasttrack is essentially a RAID ONLY controller.
Many RAID controllers (my adaptec e.g.) can also operate as just a "regular" controller too, and no configuration is needed.
Almost none of them can handle CD/DVD/ATAPI though.

yeah the Promise FastTrak 378 on the P4C800-E Dlx board can be configured as IDE only or Raid in the ASUS Bios (two different drivers are required, one when in Raid mode, another when in IDE mode.). Would be nice if the Promise Fasttrak 376 on the P4PE was the same, but it appears the same can be accomplished using Raid 0+1.

Neither allows the use of DVD/CDRom.. They are hard drive only. The VIA controller on the P4P800-dlx is the same way.

Originally Posted by ehead

But then, hey ... I always looked at this on board RAID on the P4PE as just a bonus anyway...

Me too. I looked at it as a way to add more hard drives