Advice on SATAII (storage) HDD installation?...

[Gamehendge Jazz]

Preparing to install four WD500GB SATAII HDD's to an Asus P5W DH Deluxe mobo, and looking for any tips, instructions, or advice on the most efficient way to do this (in terms of cable connection, RAID or no RAID, RAID-Type).

Currently have a WD RAPTORX SATA150 installed as the Master drive. The four 500GB SATAII drives will serve as storage drives. The mobo can support 6 x SATAII and has the following connectors: SATA1 (Master), SATA3, SATA4, RAID1, RAID2, SATA2

http://images10.newegg.com/NeweggImage/productimage/13-131-025-04.JPG

[Gamehendge Jazz]

Meant to add that one more internal SATA drive will be added in the future that will have a different capacity from the four I'm preparing to install (fwiw).

[Paul Komski]

With four large SATAs like that for storage then RAID Level5 (http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/perf/raid/levels/singleLevel5-c.html) would seem like a good idea if your mobo's chipset supports it (will have a look at its manual later). If not it really depends on whether your priority is performance or capacity or backup.

The cable connection is straightforward with one cable per drive.

[Gamehendge Jazz]

Paul, thanks. The board supports 0/1/5/10. Priority would be capacity.

The reason I threw out the cable connection comment has to do with the orange EZ_RAID1 & EZ_RAID2 connectors. Wasn't sure if I should look out for anything in the BIOS or upon configuration.

[Paul Komski]

It looks as if the group of 4 headers are on the intel chip and the group of 2 are on the asus (EZ-backup) chip (presumably the same as those called RAID 1 and 2).

They can be cross-configured but putting the four similar SATAs on the intel chip would seem to be the best way to go.

A RAID 5 would give you 3*500gb total striped capacity but with the ability to recover if any of the four drives goes down.

You could max out 4*500 as RAID0 which would have the maximum capacity plus performace but be the most liable to failure since failure of one would lose data on all four drives.

RAID 10 gives you 2*500 but with good performance and good backup there being a complete mirror of both sets of two drives.

A sofware RAID (eg by using dynamic disks or hardware JBOD) would allow the full 4*500 as one big volume with bad performance but only the loss of the data on one drive if one drive goes down.

There are some who would say that RAID0 and JBOD are not RAID at all since there is no Redundancy at all - you get the full amount of storage but with different consequences when drives fail.

[Gamehendge Jazz]

I'm having trouble getting all four of these drives initialized. I've gotten three up and formatted (connected to: SATA2, SATA4, EZ-RAID1).

I removed the three initialized/formatted drives, connected the fourth to the SATA4 slot. At this point I can see it in the disk manager, but I can't get it to initialize.

Any ideas? Thanks for the input...

[Gamehendge Jazz]

Update (if anyone has any ideas): The SATA3 & SATA4 slots can be installed and configured without problems. I can setup a RAID0 with these if I choose.
However, the EZ_RAID slots do not cooperate. Not sure what I'm overlooking, but when I connect to these I get a "3rd Slave Drive Error" or "4th Master Drive Error".