Installation of the Iwill SIDE-RAID66 went along smoothly till
we tried to get it running. The card fits into any PCI slots. I installed it
into the 4th PCI slot of my Abit VT6X4 motherboard. I had to do some bending of
the IDE cables because the two IDE ports are 90 degrees of each other. The final
install looks pretty clean but I really didn't like the bends in the cable.
The two hard drives used for the RAID 0 setup were 40 Gig 7,200
RPM Maxtor units. Having the drives setup as a RAID 0 would give me one big 80
Gig hard drive. A lot of space for sure! You should use identical drives if
possible.
After checking all the connections, I fired up the system and
entered the SIDE-RAID66 BIOS. From the BIOS you can setup RAID and remove RAID.
The BIOS correctly stated the drives were 40 Gigs each. However, after I set the
drives up in a RAID 0 setup it stated that the new striped drive was just 18
Gigs! It turns out that the Iwill BIOS can not correctly state value for drives
over 34 Gigs. It just splits up some random number of what the size of the new
drive is. In this case, it thinks two 40 gigs drives striped together is an 18
Gig drive.
This had us really confused for awhile and we were sure
something was wrong. Not being able to find a solution we decided to just format
the striped drives and see what the final number says. Sure enough, when the
format was done, it gave us what we wanted; one big 80 Gig hard drive. This
misreading by the BIOS of big drives makes FDISKing the drive a little more
work. You will have to use percentage value instead of hard values when dividing
up the drive (if that is what you want to do).
Speaking of FDISK, it's a good idea to disconnect any Zip drive
if you have one. This is because FDISK thinks the Zip is a hard drive and will
try to include that in the setup. You will really be screwed if FDISK sees the
Zip drive as disk 1 because that's the only drive you can made active. For this
review, I FDISK the RAID 0 drive into four equal size drives.
Next page: How does it perform?
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