KR7A-RAID Stability Issues

[Guest]

I am running KR7A-RAID and Athlon XP 1700+ I am running RAID-1 with 2 Seagate Barracuda IV hard drives (60GB ST360021A) and Crucial PC-2100 memory (2 x 256 MB). I am using NTFS. WinXP gets corrupted in about 2-3 days and I am forced to format and reinstall. (in fact my 3Com 905CX-TXNM NIC corrupts both Win2k and WinXP...Linux is happier than can be though)

So after going through many formats with WinXP I went back to Win2k. I had similar problems with Win2k stability until I upgraded to the Highpoint 2.3 drivers for the RAID controller. Now CHKDSK gets run about every time I power down and let me system sit for a while. My NTFS partitions are not getting corrupted (any errors are corrected), but I am not sure about my system stability at all.

Also, I can not get Norton SystemWorks 2002 to install cleanly. I usually get an error at some point during setup.

I am thinking there is some problem with the IDE ports on the motherboard, but I am not sure. Any suggestions?

 

[Guest]

I can add to this a little. I have three systems running on this motherboard and problems with one of them:

System 1:
KR7A-RAID w/ 1600+ Processor
Crucial PC2100 2 x 256 MB
(1) Seagate Barrracuda ATA IV - 20 GB
Netgear FA311TX NIC
OS: Win2k Pro SP2

This system runs great, 24x7 no problems.


System 2:
KR7A-RAID w/ 1900+ Processor
Crucial PC2100 2 x 256 MB
(2) Seagate Barrracuda ATA IV - 20 GB, RAID 0 (Striped)
Netgear FA311TX NIC
OS: Win2k Pro SP2

This system runs great, 24x7 no problems.


System 3:
KR7A-RAID w/ 1900+ Processor
Crucial PC2100 2 x 256 MB
(4) Seagate Barrracuda ATA IV - 80 GB, RAID 1 (Mirrored)
3Com 3C905C-TXM
OS: WinNT 4.0 Server SP4
WinNT 4.0 Server SP6a
Win2k Server SP2
Win2k Pro SP2

This system runs terribly. We are having a great deal of difficulty implementing any mirroring on the system. We can install and run the system no problem with either a single disk setup or RAID 0 array. As soon as we go to the mirror and install any additional software, service packs, drivers, etc. the OS corrupts and becomes inoperable.

We've gone to the new drivers (v2.3) and that hasn't helped. I think this is an issue that could be resolved with a BIOS update to the RAID controller but when ABIT will roll around to that is hard to tell. Unfortunately, you can't update to the latest BIOS from Highpoint, I'd like to see if that would solve the issue.

So my suggestion is: lose the RAID 1 setup. If you really need mirrored hard drives, get a third party RAID solution (i.e. Promise, IWill, etc.). If you can get away without redundancy you'll probably be fine.

Good luck. Can anybody out there add to this fine little ABIT mess?