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I've put together my new DAW. Below are the basic specs:

Gigabyte K8ns Ultra 939 Mobo
2 GB Ram (DDR PC3200 Ram - 2x Kingston 1024mb)
AMD 64 4000 CPU
80gb IDE Western Digital HD (Win XP SP2 & Programs)

(2) Western Digital SATA 120gb (Samples/Beats)

(2) Western Digital SATA 200gb (Audio/Mixes)

I'll be mainly using Nuendo 3.0 and a few other audio apps.

I'd like to stripe one of the aforementioned SATA drive pairs for my audio drive for faster disk i/o.

Should I use the Silicon controllers or the Gigabyte Nvidia controllers on the mobo to run the raid array? Would it be possible to run 2 mirrored Raid sets?

(I've read in another forum that the Silicon Raid controllers lock on this motherboard and are more efficient while the Gigabyte Nvidia Raid controllers don't lock and thus are not good for the hard drives)

All feedback is appreciated - I'm building this myself and could use all the help I need.

Thanks

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Guest Fri, 04/15/2005 - 07:38

HI,
use the native Nvidia Raid, the SI chipset has been known to cause clicks and pops very randomly on some AMD boards including the one you have.

there seeems to be no difinative reason why. on the dual opterons and many intel systems the SI works great.
my daw has drives on both with no issues, (2 sets of raid same board)
we have a large # of people when we first starting using that board that also have used the SI with no issues
however we found enough problems with it (as well as posts in forums) to try to not use it.

the M-Audio cards seems to bring this to light more than others.

Scott
ADK

Big_D Sat, 04/16/2005 - 04:52

Would it be possible to run 2 mirrored Raid sets?

Sure, it's called 0+1 and is the safest way to implement a striped array. In RAID 0 (striped array) if the array gets out of sync for any reason you've lost everything. By adding a RAID 1 (mirrored array) you have a backup of your striped drives and can just rebuild the array from the mirrored drives. You'll need 4 HDD's of the same size (I would suggest 4 identical drives) and set them up using the RAID 0+1 array option in your bios.

Good Luck!

anonymous Wed, 04/27/2005 - 16:25

Thanks for the replies fellas - I actually set things up so that both the SATA 120GB drives are mirrored on the Silicon Controller. I also have both the 200GB drives mirrored on Nvidia Controller.

Per your suggestion I'll be using the Nvidia mirrored array for my audio work under Nuendo.

Windows however now doesn't recognize both of my DVD drives (2x Sony DRU 710A).

Prior to installing windows I enabled Raid in the Bios and also set up Raid for the Nvidia & SIL controllers.

After I initially installed Windows XP it recognized both of the DVD drives. However after installing the drivers & software that came with the mobo (Gigabyte K8ns ultra 939) Windows now doesn't recognize my DVD drives (I can't see them nor use them in the "My Computer" window). Windows does however recognize one of the DVD drives in Device Manager - there's a yellow exclaimation next to it's icon and the it's property window states:

"Windows cannot load the device driver because there is a duplicate device already running in the system (Code 42)".

I don't know what or how this happened? Is there a Bios setting I should change?

All my drives are as follows:

Primary IDE Master: 80 gb Western digital (Master)
Primary IDE Slave: Internal Iomega 250MB Zipdrive.

2ndary IDE Master: Sony DVD Drive
2ndary IDE Slave: Sony DVD Driver

(2) SATA 200GB SATA WD as Raid 0 on the Nvidia Controller.
(2) SATA 120GB SATA WD as Raid 0 on the Silicon Controller.

Everything properly shows up except the DVD drives and I'm at a hault as I can't install anything else on the system without them.

I'm going out of my mind here - the fact that I have my MCP only makes me feel like more of a dumbass.

All help appreciated.

Lou