RAID 0 Set-up Question with 4 Drives

[Norm_Li]

Hey,

I'm planning on buying two 750GB Seagate Baracuda 7200rpm SATAII 3Gbs internal harddrives and setting them up in a RAID 0 disk array. I have 2 more slots available for that on my Asus P5LD2 Deluxe Motherboard which I would liek to add an additiona two 750GB Seagates when I feel like I can afford it instead of buying 4 at one time.

My question is...once the 2 have been installed and at a later date I wish to install 2 more for a total of 4, would that cause a problem for installing since I have already written data on the first 2 disks for a few months? Would I have to reformat all drives for the 4 to work together or can I just simply add the two new drives and it would work perfectly and I wouldn't have to format the 2 original drives?

Any tips would be great!

Thanks,

Norm

[GenJerDan]

You'll lose everything and have to start over if you want to stripe across the 4 drives.

Just adding another set of 2...no problem.

And you may be able to convince the OS to add the new set to the old set, but I'm not persackly sure on that. I've seen something to that effect, but never tried it, and haven't a clue how to do.

Much easier to just bite the bullet and rebuild the drives.

[Norm_Li]

Does this mean that if I had two 750GB drives and then a few months later I buy 2 more 750GB drives, I can set them up on two seperate RAID disk arrays so that I have basically a total of TWO 1.5TB Raid disks on the single motherboard?

This motherboard also has 2 IDE slots that I can place ATA100/133 harddrives in...and also a seperate add-on controller for 4 more SATAII harddrives that I screw in to backpanel. If I have 4 harddrives hooked up to the rear backpanel SATAII, 2 hooked up to the IDE on the motherboard, and 4 harddrives hooked up to the SATAII slots on the motherboard, does that mean I could have 3 seperate RAID setups at the same time or you can only have ONE at a time and the rest are just standard drives?

I've never set-up RAID before so that is why I ask.

I just ordered a Blackmagic Decklink HD Pro card and would like to be able to capture/playback uncompressed HD in real-time so that is why I'm setting up this RAID. If I never, would that mean dropped frames during capture and laggy playback with the RAID with my Blackmagic card? What is the size of files of uncompressed HD 10bit in 4:2:2 or 4:4:4?

Thanks!

[GenJerDan]

It'll depend on the controller.

Looking at the specs for the motherboard, it looks like one internal SATA set and one external SATA set.

Can you hook up more than 2 drives internal and 2 external? I've never seen a daisy-chained SATA...all I've seen are one socket, one cable, one drive per.

You already have the MoBo? The book should explain the different possible configurations. I can't find anything online that go into in any detail.

But normally, you can have one RAID set per channel. Possibly even one huge set combining the channels (but I'd be wary of that with an on-the-motherboard setup).

[Norm_Li]

Yep, I have the mobo but the manual doesn't go into any detail about the setups and the questions I have in my mind.

Okay, here's the slots:

1) SATA1, SATA2, SATA3, SATA4 on all next to each other on the motherboard.
2) SATA RAID1 single slot near the rear panel but on the motherboard
3) Optional SATA add-on (that came with mobo) which has 2 external ports but also on the other end (which is facing inside the tower) is 2 more ports that say SATA1, SATA2, SATA3, SATA4. It also has a 4-pin power female connector on the outside and 4-pin power female connector on the inside.

What I don't understand is...the optional add-on doesn't plug into the motherboard itself so how does the add-on communicate with the mobo? You can plug the SATA cables from the the harddrives to the add-on's slots but then what? That's just harddrives powered up and connected to the add-on but not connected to the mobo?? I'm confused!

[GenJerDan]

What I don't understand is...the optional add-on doesn't plug into the motherboard itself so how does the add-on communicate with the mobo? You can plug the SATA cables from the the harddrives to the add-on's slots but then what? That's just harddrives powered up and connected to the add-on but not connected to the mobo?? I'm confused!

I think I read that it uses a PCI-E card for that. And I think it said it's not available yet. (Although if it did say that, who knows when it was written. Might be available now.)

I really don't want to say things that may be incorrect... I Googled the MoBo model number and went through the results quickly. Might be better for you to do the same and look more carefully than I did, compare what they say to what you have sitting in front of you.

It usually takes me days to get everything straight in my head and hands when I'm building something. And even then it's cross-my-fingers and power up.

One thing that jumped out was that the external connection is supposed to be hot-swappable, which would be nice. (But not on-point vis a vis your questions. :) )