Board Features II
The all-new ICH5 Southbridge, or in this case the ICH5R. I spoke briefly about this earlier but now feel it's time to show you one of two of its inherent features. The ICH5 and ICH5R both support 2 independent, driver-less S-ATA channels with one drive per port. The ICH5R, however, goes a step further by providing an integrated RAID (RAID0 as there's only two ports and one driver per port) function. Intel like to trumpet this feature as one can add a second drive later (preferably identical to the present OS-holding one) to form RAID0. It sounds perfect in practice, but execution is a little more involved. This particular feature caught my eye, so I tried adding a second Seagate 120GB S-ATA to the existing OS drive. I'll quickly delineate the steps needed, so you can decide if it's for you.
You have to ensure that BIOS is set-up for the eventual RAID before installing the OS on the first drive. You then install the OS on a single drive and, when prompted, install the RAID driver during setup.
Once the OS is installed, Windows XP Pro. in our case, you need to install the Intel's Application Accelerator 3.0 RAID edition. This easy-to-use GUI allows you to integrate a second drive to form RAID0. The stripe size is configurable between 8 - 128KB in 8KB increments. A lower value usually gives excellent transfer speeds, whilst a larger value is considered better if your data consists mainly of large files.
Here's a second drive added with a RAID strip size of 16KB. All that's left is for the system to migrate data over to the second drive. This, thankfully, happens in the background but can take some time.
Migration took in excess of 2 hours. It seemed excruciatingly slow as I was eager to find out just how RAID0 performed on a S-ATA platform.
A reboot and a run of HDTach 2.63 later:
Not too shabby with 2 x 120GB Seagate drives populating the RAID.
ATTO seemed to like it. The 32MB total length was chosen to ensure that the drives' cache didn't colour results.
It's handy that an OS re-install isn't required when adding second hard drive to an existing one in the hope of creating a RAID0 array, but it still requires careful setting-up before the initial drive is installed. The slightly ironic thing is that two retail motherboards that we currently have both feature add-on Promise S-ATA RAID controllers.