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Originally posted by: radicool
Can anybody suggest the best way to hook up 7 drives?
You haven't told us the use of the drives (including necessary minimum speed acceptible per use (for example, archives don't need max performance), the length of cables necessary, and perhaps most important, which pairs of drives will be used simultaneously in the case of those with parallel interface.
I have 1 x DVD reader, 1 x DVD writer, 1 x CD writer, 1 x old 40GB IDE, 1 x old 60GB IDE, and 2 x 160GB SATA.
I'll just give you a generic answer first because often the hypothetical,
possible advantages of certain logical arrangements of PATA drives, don't pan out to real world benefits for most uses- In that context, do what makes cable routing easiest and if that doesn't work out per your use, THEN change it, beign sure to benchmark before and after any changes so you have a solid comparison more than just a human perception of what feels faster.
For example, put the parallel interfaced opticals in the lowest of your case bays and put bottom two on one IDE channel as master/slave, and so on for the next two, except since you have one or two HDD, put those at the top of the 3.5" drive rack or bottom of 5-1/4, next to the others with same channel PATA.
Since SATA is one drive per channel, that's a no-brainer, put them the furthest away since the thin SATA cable is easier to route, easier to tie-off/secure. That is, presuming placement allows sufficient cooling. IE- there are more factors to consider than just what channel.
I know I could get rid of some of them, but I'd like to have them all hooked up if possible.
Ok, though if that 40GB or 60GB HDD uses ball bearings, it could be the lone component(s) in your system that create a high pitched whining sound continually, which I find objectionable, though I suppose if you have it in a tertiary role it might be spun down for most of the system on-time.
I was thinking of something like the 3 CD/DVD drives + 40GB IDE on the IDE connections,
Yes, that is an obvious choice. If you will be doing drive-drive transfers between any two of these, put those two drives on opposing cables, master or slave doesn't matter (in the context, just as long as it's right still).
... and then plug an IDE to SATA converter into the 60GB to connect it to SATA.
I'd advise against this, while people do initially get those adapters to work ok, over time the connection can get flaky, IMO it'd be better to use a PCI card for addt'l IDE channels if you REALLY need that many PATA drives, but frankly I'd think about getting rid of one, the DVD reader if you don't play DVD movies a lot, or the CDRW if you don't burn a lot of CDR.
Then I want to put the 2 x 160GB into a RAID 0 as my primary drive.
Tell us about your backup strategy. Well, really I mean, tell us that you have a good one and do it regularly. RAID0 is not really much of a performance gain, in fact for many uses it is slower than if you had used the two drives separately, one running the OS and the other apps, or for source and destination of larger files when video or audio editing, a scratch space for photoshop/etc or pagefile, etc.
There are of course synthetic benchmarks meant to isolate the array that show some gains, but that's not usually how they'll be used, and you'd have to counter-bench using them in the split configuration of maximized simultaneous I/O to really compare. However, if you had a third drive of same size, I'd think about RAID5, EXCEPT, if you start creating arrays dependant on a pariticular controller (0 or 5), then if the board fails your data is stuck till you get another compatible controller. For this reason, I never put any valuable data arrays on a motherboard integral controller unless I had a spare PCI card (in the old days, you could get promise chips onboard that were the same but you have to HAVE that separate card too, 'cuz if you had to go out and buy in an emergency that's downtime and you could buy a whole board (though that gets more expensive, and harder to find boards a year or more after production stops).
What's the best RAID to use on the mobo? Asus EZ, Intel or JMicron?
The best RAID is RAID
1 using the southbridge integral controller, Intel Matrix, not the SiI or JMicron. That, or same controller w/o RAID. Any performane RAID0 would gain you, is completely offset by the time and inconvenience of the more regular backups to safeguard the data or % chance of failure * time it'll take to restore everything. So of course I advise against RAID0, but if you insist, use the Intel controller.
And which SATA port should I use for the standalone 60GB?
One of the ones that doesn't have another drive plugged into it yet, also through the southbridge integral controller.
Of course, it's supposed to work fine no matter how you hook it up (except the RAIDed drives on same controller) so have fun with it.