motherboard decision help

[Rodolfo J. Paiz]

At 16:25 3/14/2004, you wrote:
>Re the GA-7N400 Pro2 that you discuss above, one thing I've always
>wondered about these boards with onboard RAID,... is it possible to
>attach additional drives to the RAID cable sockets and use them as
>ordinary (i.e., NON-RAID) drives? So that we could have more than four
>IDE drives on the system?

Yes. As a matter of fact, that's the best way to use them, since the 
onboard RAID is usually some sort of proprietary software RAID in the 
drivers anyway, and the Linux software RAID is far better tested and more 
reliable (plus, supported and built-in and open source and free and 
gratis...) I definitely recommend using those ports as simple EIDE ports; 
if you want RAID, use Linux software RAID or get a hardware RAID adapter 
like 3Ware which is a far better choice and is also supported natively by 
the Linux kernel.

>(In fact I've a surplus of ATA drives already, with several in the range
>of 8-40 gigs lying on the "spare parts" shelf at the moment.)

If you get to the point where some/any of those drives are no longer useful 
to you, but they still work, can I have them? Any drive of 1GB or more is 
useful to me, since we use them to rebuild old computers (Pentium Classic 
boxes usually, between 75 and 200 MHz) and then donate them to rural public 
schools, orphanages, etc. See http://www.rule-project.org for the software 
to do this if desired.


-- 
Rodolfo J. Paiz
rpaiz at simpaticus.com
http://www.simpaticus.com