[ServinginEcuador]

Quad,

Yeah, I do hope that the Maxtor is the right drive for me. Even if it has 8MB of cache I'll be quite happy, and happily reformat, reinstall, and re-setup everything once again. It'll all be worth it if I can get the RAID0 drives working on the DV stuff.

I hear you about finding stuff in many places of the world. Living in the states, or Canada, spoils us completely, and blinds us to the way that some odd 90% of the world lives. Having hundreds and hundreds of websites that will sell you exactly what you want, take returns if there's a problems, and can send it to you without customs stealing it or charging 40-100% of the cost, is a rare and unique blessing that the US far too often takes for granted.

 

[ServinginEcuador]

Well, I finally got things setup right with the PATA and SATA RAID 0 drives. Before I switched the SATA drives into RAID mode I bought and installed (2) Maxtor 80GB drives. From Windows I simply initialized and formatted the drives in a RAID 0 array. I then setup WinXP on the new RAID 0 array, all the while the two Maxtor SATA drives were there. Getting WinXP and the drivers and installation all down took a LONG time. It was also quite frustrating as the manual leaves out a few things that prevent novices from setting up their system. One thing being that the SATA RAID defaults as the boot drive array, and it took me a while to figure out what was wrong. Once I got the 80GB drives running with WinXP I went into the BIOS and setup the SATA drives into a RAID 0 array, rebooted, and again used Windows to initialize and set them up for use.

It took me more than an hour to get both RAID arrays setup and working correctly, but now I'm up and running with no problems. Well, I still have one small problem in that the Maxtor drives, while UDMA6 will only run as UDMA2/ATA33 for some stupid reason. I hope to fix that and get the drives setup to run at full-speed, but can deal with it as is for now.

Thanks and props to all who popped in with some advice, especially Helter Skelter with his advice on initializing the drives through Computer Management.

 

[Quad]

For you DMA problems look in the BIOS and make sure the IDE controller settings regarding DMA and IDE Type setting are correct. AUTO should work. Also in the Device Manager (Conrol Panel - Performance and Maint. - System - Hardware - Device Manager - or compmgmt.msc) and make sure the ide controllers are set to DMA if available.

 

[ServinginEcuador]

Quad,

I can't access any setting for the HD since it is in RAID. The only thing I have access to is whether to set them up as RAID 0, 1, 0+1, or JOBD. With this M/B you simply can't access the PATA RAID drive info.

After all that I finally figured out what the problem was. It ended up being caused by the IDE cable I used. It was a really good IDE cable that came with the M/B, but I guess it wasn't an ATA133 cable. Figuring that was the problem, late last night I decided to swap the really nice rounded cable I had off of the primary IDE slot that was running my two optical drives to the PATA hard drives. As soon as I did that the VIA RAID BIOS reported the drives at ATA133, and dumped the ATA33 setting it originally had. Now I just have to find an ATA133 cable to put onto the optical drives since they now run a lot slower due to the cable. That is, IF I can find an ATA133 cable here in the country.

 

[Quad]

They must be sad cables to slow down optical drives! Usually MB makers try to give cables that will not make you think the MB is a POS. Glad it is all working for you. Have you tried using the RAID for editing yet?

 

[ServinginEcuador]

Quad,

So far I've only just gotten the software installed again. The 30+GB of video is on the drive, and so far it runs in realtime in Premiere. It ran in realtime on the old setup, so that's not a big change. Once I install After Effects Pro that will be the big test. It ran at 3 frames per second before, and hopefully I can squeeze out a few more now. I may also overclock the system by 10% via the BIOS to see it that helps and remains stable.