SATA, SATAII and maybe even PATA133 in a raid?

bangaho · 30 May 2006 at 12:11

I am considering putting a Small raid together, initially with some 250gig maxline III drives, My controller only supports sata 150. but it looks like i may have to use a mixture of drive models:

MaXLine III
250GB
SATA 1.5Gb
7L250S0

MaXLine III
250GB
SATA 3.0Gb
7V250F0

Will there be any problems or performance drop? I am hoping that they are the same drive, just some support a faster speed.

also i have 2 IDE channels going spare, would PATA133 drives be a problem?

MaXLine III
250GB
PATA
7L250R0

Sorry if this has been asked before, i ran a couple of searches on sata + sataii raid but couldnt find the specific answers. Many thanks for any help.

smids · 30 May 2006 at 12:40

It will work but you will have to set the jumper on the SATA-II drive to force 150MB/s external transfer rate. Also, what RAID are you looking at? RAID-0 should ideally be two identical drives to avoid any performance hits, e.g. running at the speed of the slowest disk, of one drive on the other. Further, it does depend a lot on the controller being used. The drives will work together though.

semi-pro waster · 30 May 2006 at 13:42

smids is right about the SATA drives and what will or won't work.

As for the PATA drives, you can't connect them to the SATA Raid array as far as I am aware unless you do it as JBOD(Just a Bunch Of Disks) under the Nforce tools in Windows and even then it will offer no real benefit for you.

smids · 30 May 2006 at 13:45

There is much confusion over this semi-pro isn't there? Can you RAID across the platforms? From what I have read, yes, but I've never seen anyone do it - it doesn't seem possible but what nV have stated seems to imply it can be done. Quite frankly I'm in the dark - do you know the definitive answer semi-pro?

semi-pro waster · 30 May 2006 at 14:11

Afraid I don't know the definitive answer, I'm just going on the basis that even if it could work it doesn't offer any real benefits but adds a major problem in the need for all drives to continue working. I'd be extremely wary of trying to connect two different platforms together and hoping they would work, I'd also assume that you are limited to the speed of the slowest bus on the system i.e. ATA100 or ATA133.

If someone else wants to try I'd be interested in the results but I can't since I'm not on a Nvidia chipset. If it does work I still don't think it will be worth it since Raid0 isn't the most reliable of storage systems anyway but I could be wrong. It is all assumptions on my part but based on past experience it doesn't seem overly likely or worthwhile

bangaho · 30 May 2006 at 15:43

I dont know about the Nvidia controller or any other hardware based solutions but windows disk managment -could- be used (although its pretty slow I think?) to build a volume across multiple disks or extend a simple or dynamic volume onto new disks. It doesn't seem to mind what model or interface the disk has.