Callandor - Good bit of information. I have never played with SATA, and your information was very informative. (especially the part of the software Raid (using CPU) VS Separate card.
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Advice sought on motherboard for AMD Athlon 64 3800+
I have a *lot* of questions. I am not looking for an answer to everything for the points on offer though - any information that gets me nearer to the goal of having a working PC will be very useful. URLs to useful web sites and recommendations for companies that have a helpful sales department will also be helpful.
I am putting together a bare-bones PC in the UK. It has been a while since I did this and I need some advice about options that are new to me.
Option one is SATA. At the moment all my hard disks are IDE although I need to buy at least one new drive, possibly two if I go for Option 2: RAID.
My questions:
Is it even possible to buy a motherboard for the AMD64 3800+ that does NOT have SATA/RAID these days? I couldn't find one in the (unhelpfully laid-out) on-line store I was looking at.
I quite like the idea of getting SATA, but I am not sure how it works re the devices you can connect. With IDE you can connect two devices per IDE socket, and you get two sockets as standard. What is the situation re SATA? Can you connect more than one SATA device to a single SATA socket? Does this affect performance?
Do m'boards that have SATA sockets also have IDE sockets ? I saw one board that seemed to imply it had one connection of each type. Is this standard or does it vary from board to board?
Re RAID. My understanding is that if you "have RAID" then you have a system that has one or more pairs of hard disks such that one disk automatically keeps a copy of what is on the other disk so that if one disk dies then you still have the data on the other disk. I also understand that RAID is like LAN/audio in that you can have the service on-board or have a separate card.
Is on-board RAID worth having? A few years ago they started to sell boards on-board audio but the quality was dreadful (is it any better these days - I still use my trusty SoundBlaster Live!?). OTOH on-board LAN was a god-send for those of us with systems bursting at the seems with PCI cards.
As with SATA, I'd like to know how RAID configured as far as sockets and devices are concerned. I don't want to get a board that "has RAID" but at the expense of having no IDE sockets - well, without being aware of that before I buy anyway.
Many thanks for any help,
K
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Answers
as an addition to the right suggestions of Calandor i can only say:
>Do m'boards that have SATA sockets also have IDE sockets ? I saw one board that seemed to imply it had one connection of each type. Is this standard or does it vary from board to board?
the recent ide/atapi devices(cd-rom,dvd-rom,cd-
a few links:
http://www.serialata.org/s
http://www.webopedia.com/T
It's not hard to find a motherboard that has both. My motherboard has both and will support Raid. Unless your a huge gamer or have lots of data that needs to be backed up, just save yourself the headache and hook up an IDE hard drive. I think they have 8200 RPM ones out now, but they are priced kina high.
Thanks all for you comments, to Callandor especially. I'll give it another day before I dish out the points.
talkabout_wireless,
> Unless your a huge gamer [...] just save yourself the headache and hook up an IDE hard drive
What's the connection between gaming and RAID? I am on sabbatical from a 2-year stint of Everquest. Are you suggesting that RAID is handy if one's disk containing the gigabytes of game files breaks down?
I am definitely going to go with SATA, possibly hardware RAID. All I need now to make my dream PC (well, for the next 6 months that is :-) is someone in the UK who can sell me 4Gb of DDR2 RAM in matched pairs. Corsair seems to be the way to go, but the entire UK seems to be out of stock - unless you know different!
K
Well, I recently built an AMD system not too long ago. What it mostly depends on is what you're using your system for. The barebone that I just built was with a VIA chipset that came with dual IDE 133 ports *and* it also came with built-in two VIA SATA RAID ports (hardware RAID, not software). The thing with SATA is that you cannot connect two SATA devices to the same port. Each one is made specifically to attach to one port at a time. I haven't had any problems with my VIA system. As for the video card part of the system, you can get one with onboard video if you're low on cash, but if you have a little extra, get one with an AGP 8x port (with or without onboard video) or PCI-Express video port. Most motherboards that have SATA for RAID usually have at least 2 ports, if not 4. Check out www.via.com.tw for more info on Athlon 64 chipsets.
I just built an expensive gaming system with an AMD 3800+, Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe board (I chose it for other things than SLI, as I got an ATI card which doesn't do SLI), ATI X850 XT PE video card, 4x512MB Crucial Ballistix PC3200 memory. This motherboardboard is pretty nice, as usual for a premium Asus board. It has 2 on-board SATA RAID controllers with 4 ports each. You can use them for raid(s) or for just individual drives. You set that up in the bios. If you use a controller for a raid, and you use lesss than 4 of the connectors, you can't use the empty ones for anything else. So you could have a number of possibilities, but what I did was make my C drive from two SATA-II 80GB drives in a RAID-0 array (striped, for performance), on the nvidea controller (SATA-300), and for my D drive I used two 300GB SATA drives off the Silicon image controller, in RAID-1 mirror, for data redundency. There is also a floppy connector and a master and slave IDE connector. The CD/dvd drives use up the slave, and on the master IDE I just have it going to a drive drawer but you could run two IDE drives from that if you wished. It has PCI Express video bus, which seems to be becoming standard for the highest-end, newest video cards. But other than that, I don't think there's any real advantage over AGP8x.
Complaints about the board: Only one firewire header. I opted for the case-front connection so I couldn't use the rear slot-mounted firewire port. Pissed me off because I have some firewire external drives I'd like to leave hooked up at the rear. I guess they had the philosophy that USB2 is most popular; there are 8 USB2 ports!
Don't enable Asus Q-fan; it seems to conflict with AMD cool-n-quiet and the CPU fan sometimes stops at idle, which most people don't like.... Asus says just turn Q-fan off.
The SLI motherboard can be set for single graphics card. I chose it because I wanted to play with SATA-II and use PCIx video card.
RAID-0 doubles the effective drive size. I have two 36GB and it gives me 72Gb effective C drive. And two 80GB gives me 160GB for my C drive, on another machine. That's because it splits the data between the two, as if it were one big drive with the platters in two locations. The performance increase comes from the fact that two sets of actuators are now working together, sharing the work. Windows sees one drive. RAID-1 on the other hand gives you the same size and performance (pretty much) as the individual drive size because its just a mirror of the data, for backup in case a drive fails. The array can be restored from the remaining good drive after you replace the failed one.
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by: CallandorPosted on 2005-02-15 at 06:15:08ID: 13313776
>Is it even possible to buy a motherboard for the AMD64 3800+ that does NOT have SATA/RAID these days? I couldn't find one in the (unhelpfully laid-out) on-line store I was looking at.
Probably not. It is very cheap for manufacturers to include RAID these days, and software RAID controllers that use the cpu are not very expensive. It's no big deal, don't use it if you don't want it.
>Can you connect more than one SATA device to a single SATA socket? Does this affect performance?
No. SATA is designed to not share the cable - that's how it achieves the speed and small size of cable. Motherboards typically have more than one SATA connector to let you do this, and some have up to four.
>Do m'boards that have SATA sockets also have IDE sockets ? I saw one board that seemed to imply it had one connection of each type. Is this standard or does it vary from board to board?
Yes, this should be standard. SATA optical devices have just come out, so there are a lot devices that still need the IDE connector. Besides, for continuous throughput of large files, IDE is no worse than SATA.
>Is on-board RAID worth having? A few years ago they started to sell boards on-board audio but the quality was dreadful (is it any better these days - I still use my trusty SoundBlaster Live!?). OTOH on-board LAN was a god-send for those of us with systems bursting at the seems with PCI cards.
Onboard RAID is also known as software RAID currently, which means it's not very sophisticated and it uses your cpu to process commands. I agree that most onboard stuff, with the exception of networking, USB and Firewire, is better on separate cards: video, audio, and RAID. Onboard RAID is ok for non-critical applications, and I think it doesn't support RAID-5. Separate cards are better for where it has to be reliable and you don't want the cpu burdened.