Two RAID 1 pairs with X58A-UD3R ?

[KatManDEW]

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start OS and look intel storage manager ( if installed )

Pierre

I didn't have that installed. I found it online and installed it. It says the progress is 28% complete. I feel better knowing that the rebuild is in process, and that I can see the progress. I want to wait to install the new drives until the rebuild is complete.

Can't thank you enough for the help.

[Aussie Allan]

  If you put a stop-watch on how long 5% takes........then multiply by 20.......that's how many minutes it will take

  Aussie Allan

[KatManDEW]

It's up to 55%, which has taken about 4 hours. They're 1.5 TB drives.

I've got the new drives physically installed with the SATA cables conneted to them and routed over to the motherboard but not connected. I've got power routed over to the new drives but not connected. Just waiting for the rebuild to finish now.

I never could get two RAID1 pairs working with my old computer, which has a Gigabyte 8KNXP motherboard, so I've been worried about whether I could get it working with this one.

BTW: I need to get a new video card that does 30 bit color, to use with my new NEC PA301W monitor. I have a GTX470 now and it has a displayport connector, but it doesn't do 30 bit color. The only reasonably priced cards I can find that will do 30 bit color are the Quadro 2000 and the Firepro 5900. Anyone have any recommendations? I tried a Quadro 600 and returned it because it was slow. I don't do much gaming, but my whole system was slow with the Quadro 600. I really only do mostly photography, with Lightroom and Photoshop CS5.

[KatManDEW]

The rebuild finished successfully. I've got the new drives in there hooked up and working. I used the Intel Storage app to create the RAID1 pair with them so I could keep the data that was on them, so I'm doing the waiting game again while it migrates data from one drive to the other. They were already mirrored in my old computer, but it appreared that the only to use them as RAID1 in the new computer without loosing data was to let the Intel Storage app migrate the data from one to the other.

Thanks again to all for all the help!

[Dark Mantis]

Hey, you are very welcome.  Let us know when it has all finished as I didn't think that you should have to migrate data to the new drives unless you were just trying to increase the size of the array.

[Aussie Allan]

          Here's something worth reading re 30 bit colour depth and support..........

   Some newer graphics cards support 30-bit RGB and higher. Its color palette contains 10243 = 1,073,741,824 colors. However, there are few operating systems nor applications that support this mode yet. For some people, it may be hard to distinguish between higher color pallets than 24-bit color offers. However, the range of luminance, or grey scale, offered in a 30-bit color system would have 1,024 levels of luminance rather than the 256 of the common standard 24-bit, which the human eye notices more than what hue a colour is.

  The Quadro FX 4800 and the  Quadro CX is a fine card series for this sort of work but comes with a fine price tag as well.....Cuda cores are were most of the performance will come from for what your doing......a fair bit of research will be needed to target exactly what you need which will save you fun tickets in the long run!

  Aussie Allan

[KatManDEW]

Everything is up and running. I'm happy that I was able to add the second RADI1 pair to my system successfully.

I ordered the ATI Firepro 5900 yesterday. On paper it looks significantly faster than comparably priced Nvidia based cards like the Quadro 2000. The reviews I saw were comparing the ATI 5900 to the Quadro 4000, which costs 65% more than the ATI 5900.

Thanks again to all for the help. Happy Thanksgiving.

[KatManDEW]

Me again... I just got a new matched pair of SATA 3 drives. Is the Marvel controller the only one that is SATA 3? I know RAID 0 is not supported on that controller, but can I use RAID 1 on that controller?

[touch_and_go]

Yes you can add or create a second Raid  1 with 2  new disks  . No problem there. good luck.

[KatManDEW]

Thanks for the reply.

I added the two new drives on the Marvell controller ports (SATA 3), but there was no option to set them up as RAID in the BIOS. I had to create the RAID array in Windows Disk Manager. I wasn't sure if that was a good idea, and I'm not sure about the reliability of the Marvel controller, so I decided to move the new drives to two of the first six SATA 2 ports. The BIOS only saw the drives as 750 GB, and they are 3 TB drives. I had to update the BIOS to get it to see the full 3TB. After figuring out that I needed to re-enable RAID in the BIOS after updating the BIOS, I was up and running.

The new drives appear to be much faster than my older drives, even though they are SATA 3 drives connected to SATA 2 ports.