topic SATA 2 on RA304 Desktop in PCs & Accessories

SATA 2 on RA304 Desktop

halibuts — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 17:13:34 GMT

Hya all,

Can anyone tell me if a SATA 2 HDD will work on my RA304 which has a PTGO-VX Motherboard and work alongside the two 250Gb SATA HDDs?

I'm on the verge of buying a Western Digital WD10EACS 1000GB SATA 2 HDD and don't want to have a purchase disaster.
I currently have two Western Digital WD250 SATA HDDs with a raid 0 configuration.

Any advice will be greatly appreciated.

Cheers

Re: SATA 2 on RA304 Desktop

Blencogo — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 17:58:45 GMT

Hi halibuts and welcome.

The great advantage of SATA drives is that they are always backward compatible - so any SATA drive (I, II, III etc.) will work OK in your RA304 and also with your older SATA drives.

Good Luck

Re: SATA 2 on RA304 Desktop

halibuts — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 18:23:41 GMT

Thank you so much for your information! I'll purchase now.
Another question, will I have to reconfigure the raid setup for the additional drive to become "striped" along with the existing?
Thanks again for your most appreciated help.

Re: SATA 2 on RA304 Desktop

halibuts — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 19:33:56 GMT

I've been reading up on this and am still flummoxed as to how to sort out this raid configuration. I hope you can help.
Cheers.

Re: SATA 2 on RA304 Desktop

Blencogo — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 22:14:14 GMT

Hi halibuts,

I would leave the existing two drives in striped RAID 0 configuration and add the new drive as a normal non-RAID drive.

You can only set RAID 0 on a pair of identical drives - the striped RAID means that it writes to the two drives at the same time, a 128MB stripe to one drive then a 128MB stripe to the second, theoretically doubling the write speed.

To add a second RAID volume you would need to add two new drives in RAID 0 but for general storage I would just use a single drive with a new drive letter not formatted in any RAID configuration.

Re: SATA 2 on RA304 Desktop

halibuts — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 15:23:56 GMT

Thanks once again!

The HDD is ordered and I'll be installing on Tuesday. Will let you know if all is well.

Cheers