Re: P5K & RAID 1 Help?

Chumly wrote:
Hi,

I have the Asus P5K motherboard vanilla not the deluxe.

Can I run three hard drives such that the internal HD1 is for the OS,
and the internal HD2 plus an external eSATA HD3 are in a RAID 1
configuration?

If yes, can I then access this RAID 1 configuration as a single drive
via my network?

You see, I want to use this PC as a simple NAS (using the HD2 & HD3 in
RAID 1) as well as using this PC as a regular machine using HD1 for the
OS.

Thanks all!

PS: yep I know I could route the external eSATA connector back inside
the PC case and then mount HD3 internally, but that is not what I want.
The RAID on the P5K is only between the external eSATA connector on the
back of the motherboard, and the internal SATA E2 connector.

Alas, the manual does not precisely specify, however it does refer to
RAID sets, and does have a BIOS screen that lists all drives, and lets
you choose which two are RAID'ed. As to what happens to the others I am
not sure, but inclusive of the one eSATA port there are four internal
SATA ports, that's promising.



The board has a non-RAID Southbridge (ICH9). You'd connect
your non-RAID boot drive to that. The RAID support is
via JMB363, a separate chip. The JMB363 would have its
own driver, and support RAID1 mirror. You could connect
an external drive, do Rebuild Mirror, and that would
copy the disk connected to the internal JMB363 SATA
connector.

It would be a share like any other in Windows, so you can
share the volume created on the RAID1, with your other computers.
The only limit, would be the limit imposed by the OS installed
on the P5K, as to how many computers can simultaneously
connect to the same share.

vip.asus.com is inaccessible to me right now, but you could
go to the forums there and select P5K as the motherboard
model, and get some feedback from users as to how well
that works. I cannot give you a nice URL, since I cannot
get to the server.

Another source of feedback on P5K is here. There are some
people here who have used the RAID function.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductReview.aspx?Item=N82E16813131180

Since the motherboard has a couple PCI Express slots, you can always
place controllers in there later. (For a storage server, an
old PCI video card would be enough for console video.)

Paul
.

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