Pointers for Asrock A75 Extreme6 RAID?

[KonMan]

Hi All,

Im building a PC for my brother in law who has bought an Asrock A75 Extreme6 mobo with an A8 and -:

• SSD for OS
• 2x 2TB for storage (non-raid or JBOD)
• 2x 2TB RAID1

Ive got everything in the case and Im finding the BIOS really confusing.

If I set to RAID, do I need a floppy for drivers for the SSD, even though I wont have it in RAID?

Is JBOD a PITA if one HD fails?

If I do use JBOD, do I need to turn on support for 3TB, or is that just for the physical drives?

I realise that 2 or the 8 SATA ports are not part of the native chipset, (ASMedia ASM1061) If I put the SSD on that, It cant be RAIDED(?) - is there any noticeable performance difference?

Any pointers would be great....

Or, should I just use Software RAID1 in Windows 7?

Cheers,
Kon.

[Dave2972]

Originally Posted by KonMan

Hi All,

Im building a PC for my brother in law who has bought an Asrock A75 Extreme6 mobo with an A8 and -:

• SSD for OS
• 2x 2TB for storage (non-raid or JBOD)
• 2x 2TB RAID1

Ive got everything in the case and Im finding the BIOS really confusing.

1. If I set to RAID, do I need a floppy for drivers for the SSD, even though I wont have it in RAID?

2. Is JBOD a PITA if one HD fails?

3. If I do use JBOD, do I need to turn on support for 3TB, or is that just for the physical drives?

4. I realise that 2 or the 8 SATA ports are not part of the native chipset, (ASMedia ASM1061) If I put the SSD on that, It cant be RAIDED(?) - is there any noticeable performance difference?

Any pointers would be great....

5. Or, should I just use Software RAID1 in Windows 7?

Cheers,
Kon.

1. Set BIOS for the first SATA port to AHCI and connect the SSD to that port. If you are installing WIN7, it will automatically install MS AHCI drivers but you can install AMD AHCI drivers later. You don't need a floppy unless you are installing Win-XP.

2. Yes JBOD is a PITA if an HD fails. Don't use old HDs for JBOD.

3. You only need support for 3TB+ HDs for boot drives, WIN7 supports volumes larger than 3TB for storage drives.

4. As I stated in step 1. above, hook up your SSD to port 1 set to AHCI. The AMD ports are very fast. If you have a Sandforce 2281 SSD then its speed will be hugely fast compared to a standard HD, there is no need to RAID them unless you need Mega-fast speed and are OK with loosing TRIM and garbage collection.

5. From my experience, chipset drivers are much faster than WIN7's software RAID1 drivers. Experiment.

[m0n4g3]

Just use the boards inbuilt raid 5 for the storage? much faster than jbod+raid 1.... and you get redundancy across ALL data not just what is on the raid 1?

Still means you should backup sensitive data though.

[KonMan]

Thanks for the replies guys!

In the end it was alot simpler than what I anticipated.
As I didnt have the OS RAID'ed in any way, I first installed Win7 with all latest chipset drivers from AsRock (in AHCI), then proceeded to change to RAID.

I must say though, that the documentation for the BIOS, especially the RAID part is quite poor, but I got there in the end.

After a successful boot-up into Win7, I used the AMD RAID GUI in Win7 to configure 2 of the 4 'storage' HDs into RAID1.

The other 2x 2TB I did not RAID and instead created Libraries in Win7 for Movies (umm "Linux ISOs"), Pictures etc etc, pointing to different drives.

This machine is just a general 'browsing'/media streamer/server, and not for games, he is quite happy with the price/performance of the A8.

Thanks again for the suggestions/comments.

[Dave2972]

Originally Posted by KonMan

Thanks for the replies guys!

The other 2x 2TB I did not RAID and instead created Libraries in Win7 for Movies (umm "Linux ISOs"), Pictures etc etc, pointing to different drives.

Thanks again for the suggestions/comments.

8< 8<

I really like that you can spread movies, pics and music over a bunch of HDs and folders on different HDs in Win7 and combine them into libraries of whatever type you want. Very convenient .

[balckjok3r]

Originally Posted by Dave2972

8< 8<

I really like that you can spread movies, pics and music over a bunch of HDs and folders on different HDs in Win7 and combine them into libraries of whatever type you want. Very convenient .

Yeah I have mine setup like that. Just get another drive and link it to Puctures or music or whatever. Its awesome, makes it easy to keep everything in order.