Micro ATX with SATA but NO RAID?

Does anyone know if Epox or any other manufacturer make a Micro ATX
motherboard with SATA support but NO RAID?

 

can i just ask why you would want a board that does this as surely RAID is
optional and can be turned off?
Alex

 

Isnt Raid inefficent with space?

Why pay for Raid when you dont want it?

 

Most of the simple motherboard controllers, only implement RAID0, 1, or 0+1.
RAID 0, costs nothing on space. None are really 'inefficient' (is it
inefficient to keep duplicate records...).

Generally, the simplest of these controllers add no hardware, and simply
implement RAID in software using the BIOS. All that is then added to each
board, is software, which basically costs nothing to add to the board, once
it is written.
This is why manufacturers 'like' this option, since it is a way to provide
an extra 'feature', for no extra manufacturing cost on the individual units.
Units, where the SATA feature is not part of the motherboard chipset,
require extra drivers, and/or a BIOS to handle the extra interface chip
implementing the interface, so manufacturers buy a 'chipset', comprising the
interface and BIOS, which again implements the RAID option. Doing this is
cheaper, than sitting down and writing a new custom motherboard BIOS to
interface to the SATA controller, but not provide RAID.
Yes. Indeed some boards have a BIOS option, to treat the SATA connectors for
RAID, or as standard IDE ports.

Best Wishes

 

Thanks for your summary, Roger. Can you please correct my summary...

1. Raid 0 does not cost anything on space (megabytes).
2. Raid 0 does not cost anything on time (milliseconds).
3. You can turn off Raid if you want via the BIOS.

Thanks

 

Add, that for simple implementations, no hardware is needed (this is why
manyfacturers like it so much...).

Best Wishes

 

Just remember that with raid 0, if one drive breaks you loose all the data
on both drives. But raid 0 does give notable performance increases when both
reading and writing. And total storage volume is double the single drive
capacity. - its best to use identical drives here.

Raid 1 simply mirrors data over drives and so is thought to be a proper raid
(ie redundancy). Write speeds remain the same as with a single drive but
read speeds increase. Total storage is only equal to single drive
capacity. - again use identical drives.

My mobo supports 2 separate raid arrays through 2 controllers. So i run 2
120Gb seagate SATA drives as a raid 0 and (up until about 1 week ago) 2 80Gb
Western digital drives as a raid 1 - which i use for backup (files,
operating system etc). But due to serious bios problems and the incredible
noise of the WD's (i want a quiet PC) they are now in my lan party system as
raid 0. I will get 2 160Gb Seagate IDE drives just as soon as Epox release a
decent bios for the EP-8KRA2+ mobo.

So in short, i like raid and with the price of hard drives so low now
(especially IDE drives) setting up raid arrays is not as costly as once it
was.

Regards, Mark

 

Mark,

Are you saying that if I use a 120gb with a 50gb, I will only get 50+50gb
using RAID 0?

Thanks

 

yep, absolutely. you will get a theoretical 100Mb (driver are often a little
smaller than their stated capacity) - this is true with raid 1 also. If you
want to combine a 120Gb with a 50Gb then the best option with raid is a JBOD
(just a bunch of disks) where your capacity will be one 170Gb volume.

There are many different types of raid, 0, 1, 01 being the common ones. Then
it starts to get cool on raid 5. After this you are in large server
territory...

There are lots of resources on the web on this topic
try
http://www.viaarena.com/?PageID=81
http://www.pinoypc.net/hardware/raid/index2.shtml



Regards, Mark