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To: Zeuspaul who wrote (911)	5/31/1998 10:53:00 PM
From: Zeuspaul	Read Replies (1) of 14778

IDE RAID Promise Fast Track..Dual Boot More from DRWHOM on Tom's Hardware Guide Forum tomshardware.com From: the dr (DRWHOM) To: Zeuspaul (ZEUSPAUL) UNREAD 8 of 8 Posted: 5/31/98 4:18:00 PM In my system the motherboard bios boot options allows me to control whether any drives attached to the on board controllers will boot or whether the selected boot drive on the promise card will be the boot drive. I do this by going into the motherboard bios setup during bootup and either enabling or disabling the on board controllers as bootable. If I disable them then any drives on the Promise card become bootable. If I enable them then any drives on the onboard controller will boot. Disabling these controllers in the boot options menu on the motherboard bios setup does not prevent them from later functioning fully after windows loads. One of the optional ways of configuring your fours drives under the Promise Fasttrak card is to have the card configure them as a single continuous "C" drive. In order for this to work you must have fat 32 enabled on your system. In my case this allows me to have 4 quantum 6.4's become a single "C" drive of approx. 25.2 gigs. In this configuration the card fills up each drive completely with data before it writes to the next. The upside is that if one of the drives fail only the data on that drive is compromised. The down side is that because each drive is running separately, there is no performance improvement. Additionally under this configuration you must repartition and reformat the setup after you create it in the fasttrak bios. This ofcourse means you lose any data or programs you have on the drives. Another way to configure all four drives as a single drive is to configure them as a stripe. In this mode the card splits all writes onto the drives into blocks or stripes writing first to one drive then the next, the next and finally the last. All four drives then read and write blocks of the same file or program virtually simultaneously. This is supposed to offer the most continuous throughput for large audio or video files. In normal business and gaming applications I have found very little significant improvement configured this way. The downside of this configuration is that if one of the drives should fail then all your data and programs will be compromised since they are striped in blocks across all four drives. Additionally, you must repartition and reformat the mirrored array after it is created in the fasttrak bios setup before it will function. Also you must have fat 32 for this to work properly.

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