Mixed raid to rejuvenate old hard drive

A certain day of the month, is a friend to start a new SATA hard drive that day, I am alone in the computer city outside the platoon irresolute, met this gentleman, came to ask me: "Sir has for my new hard drive and the old hard drive mixed raid write a little what not?" "I said no," he told me, "Sir, write a few, many friends need to read the article of the Gentleman"

The above is not responsible for the words of the preface

What is mixed raid

To go back, with the rapid popularization of SATA hard disk, a large number of PATA hard disk (usually also have IDE hard disk, and port hard disk, ATA hard disk, etc.) also with the second line, become data backup and other uses. In fact, many friends use the PATA hard disk "service" years and soon, performance is not bad, this is a pity. Can you combine it with a SATA hard drive as a raid system to rejuvenate them again? The answer is certainly yes. It is based on this demand that Nvidia also specializes in the issue of staggered raid (Cross-con-troller raid) technology, and is applied to the nforce 250 and nforce 4 series chipsets (Figure 1, 2). Just for many friends, in order to use the old hard drive to buy a new motherboard is not realistic, based on existing hardware to play their greatest effect is their pursuit, so the following is a brief introduction to the formation of SATA and pat a interface hard disk hybrid RAID System topic.

The first thing to say is that building such a hybrid RAID system can make your old hard drive a new life, but there are some risks and pitfalls: First of all, the parameters of the two hard disks are inconsistent, which will make the probability of the data error greatly increased, especially in the raid 0 system, the greater the risk; second, The capacity of different volumes of the hard disk in the building RAID can be limited by the capacity of less than the hard drive, can cause a waste of hard disk capacity (RAID JBOD), and finally, in software RAID, the speed of the raid system is constrained by the slow-moving hard drive, which affects the overall speed of the system. And if your CPU is weaker, the raid will be more severe. In addition to these, you may also face a number of other problems, such as limited software and hardware, can be linked to the number of hard drives are different, in addition to 137G hard disk space identification problems, as well as a wide range of compatibility issues and so on. If you make up your mind to eat the crab, then keep looking down.

Mixed RAID FAQ

The primary challenge in setting up such a mixed raid is to properly set the boot sequence of the hard drives of the two interfaces, which can cause the SATA channel to conflict with the PATA channel, light the hard drive, and the system to boot properly. This is also a lot of friends in the mixing SATA and PATA hard drives, the system does not correctly identify, detect the main reason for the new hard drive. To solve this problem requires the operating system, motherboard BIOS settings, IDE hard disk jumper, and other aspects of the coordination of turbulence. For an example of ASUS P5GDC Pro motherboard (915P+ICH6R chipset), if you plan to install more than 4 disks, you must use the Windows 2000 or XP operating system, and then the IDE configuration a onboard IDE in the BIOS Oper-ate mode "is set to enhanced mode, and if you are using 4 or 4 of the following hard disks, there are no previous two restrictions.

In the boot sequence, we can generally select the hard drive of the system by setting "boot Device Priority" in the "Boot" menu to boot the system, but if you use more than five hard drives in a mixed RAID system, You should use an old e hard disk as a system disk. This is because ASUS P5GDC Pro motherboards are guided sequentially by IDE 0, IDE 1, SATA 0, and SATA 1 (Figure 3,SATAO/1 is sometimes labeled Third/fourth IDE master/slave) and, if you want to use more than 5 pieces of hard disk, the previous reference to " Onboard IDE Operate mode "must be set to" enhanced mode ", so that the system will not detect the position of the SATA hard drive, nature will not boot properly. I'm not sure if this setting is on all motherboards, but remind everyone to pay attention to their motherboard settings when similar problems arise.

The last thing to note is the PATA hard disk jumper problem, or the hard drive can not correctly identify the fault, or greatly reduce your pat a hard drive data transmission rate, this is a cliché topic.