A7V266-E Raid Question

[Guest]

I've got an ASUS A7V266-E with Raid 0 enabled with 2 identical maxtor 40 gig drives. I have a dual boot with XP and Win 98SE and I am getting periodic pauses when running games, programs etc where my disk lite comes on and it locks everything up for a couple seconds then comes back. I thought I might just live with it but I cant burn any CDs without getting buffer underrun erorrs because of this problem!!!! I have tried looking around to see if there are any new drivers for the embedded promise controller but the promise web site says not to use their drivers for embedded controllers. Asus doesnt have any updates that I saw in this area. Has anyone else experienced this problem or found a workaround for it?
Thanks.

 

[Guest]

Buffer underruns in any form can be helped out by imaging your copy to a hard drive then burning it. The pause can and does happen with differing operating systems.......ESPECIALLY 98SE and XP.......98SE and ME are okay.....2000 and XP are okay....even if you are careful ME and XP work. I simply don't see the help having the dual hard drives when every single update will have to be done in two environments. For example.......4 in 1's will need to be downloaded in 98SE and one's for XP....IF there are different versions of chipset drivers...you'll OFTEN have these conflicts. What I had my customer do who had a brand new pc made was after I installed the MSI K7T266 Pro 2 board with NO RAID.....I had him simply add the hard drive as a slave NOT BOOTABLE to the primary OS which was XP. He has been slowly transferring data......don't know why he didn't want it moved over for him as I only would have charged $20 bucks but anyway I notice no pause whatsoever. I have it set like this........

Master Maxtor 60 D740
Slave IBM 5400 20 gig
Master TDK burner
Slave DVD rom

When he burns......he is advised to avoid burn on the fly because they are now sharing IDE cables and you don't get perfection in on the fly with any burner unless separate IDE is used. So we image burned a game that typically doesn't burn easily in the first place and it worked.

As for the Raid.....Raid 0 to be exact my A7V266e was easier to make work with a bootable floppy with drivers from the Asus cd.....anyway, it worked but having a fast chipset has made me wonder how much faster without SCSI can one get....My data on this new ATA133 Hard drive alone seems to suck up data as fast as two. I pulled the drive, added a Zip and put the ATA133 60gig on Master, the other on IDE 2 master.......then TDK/Toshiba on Promise IDE's and the zip on with primary hard drive. I get more usage, larger file capacity of 120 gig which in turn keeps the fragmentation level down on XP....

Hope this helps in the least bit.....just tryin' to help.

Bob

 

[jlanka]

AFA buffer underrun, my next CD-RW is going to be something like <A HREF="http://www.buslink.com/Prodinfo/cdrw241040ide.htm" target="_new">This Buslink model</A> or something similar. The burnproof technology looks interesting.

<i>It's always the one thing you never suspected.</i>