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| Page 4 of 13 |
Board Highlights #1: ATA-100 RAID
Undoubtedly, one of the most significant enhancements would be its ATA-100 RAID support. The WO2-R uses the lesser known AMI MG80649 chipset, which enables either ATA100/66/33 RAID in RAID0, 1 or 0+1 mode. For those unacquainted with RAID modes, check here for a past write-up on it.
The AMI MG80649 ATA-100 RAID chipset
The Hyperdisk100 (i.e. AMI MG80649 chipset) supports up to 2 RAID arrays, of which each supports a maximum of 4 drives. However, the limitation of ATA-100 means that only 2 drives are connectible to each port. Hence, whilst one can plausibly utilize all 4 drives per channel (across ports), there will be no drives left for the other channel.
IDE 2/3 are the RAID ports
During startup, the ATA-100 RAID requires the user to first identify / configure the drives for RAID in its BIOS. In addition, the controller also halts automatically a new drive is detected on the IDE-RAID chain upon boot-up. The user is then compelled to set it up before proceeding.
At the BIOS menus, 2 preset configurations are available for quick prepping – Maximum Drive Availability (Mirror configuration / RAID 1) or Maximum Drive Performance (Striping or RAID 0). In addition, users requiring customized setups would have the capability to adjust various parameters, including Stripe sizes (for RAID 0), allocating a 3rd/4th spare drive (to auto-rebuild a mirrored partition that fails) and making the array bootable. However, be forewarned that altering the stripe size (default is 64KB) for an existing array would void all past data in its drives. The controller also supports Write Cache Enabling, which comes configurable with most ATA100 drives. Other basic options include reverting to old configuration (before the array was defined), deleting an array and repairing an array (when Mirrored).
The RAID configuration can also be actively viewed and controlled in the OS through a Hyper Disk RAID utility, which uses the Microsoft Management Console as an interface. The Hyper Disk RAID utility also serves as an active listener in case of drive failures for RAID 1 users. Upon a reboot and re-entering the OS, the utility kicks in and automatically attempts a rebuild of the mirrored drive.
Physical RAID Drive Array Info
The Error Log in case of drive failures...
Properties page with various settable rebuild parameters
The Array Setup Configuration
In particular, the building parameters are configurable through the Hyper Disk utility (as seen in the Properties Page). The following explains each option settable:
As aforementioned, “Repair Array” functionality is available in the BIOS. However, this BIOS addition is probably proprietary of Iwill's, as it wasn’t mentioned in AMI’s online generic guide for Hyper Disk users. Iwill may have envisaged that users could require the rebuilding of arrays even before it reaches the OS (say Linux users, where the Hyper Disk isn’t supported natively).
However, I did discover that the AMI chip is purely RAID specific and doesn’t function as a standard ATA-100 controller. Thus, one can’t simply use the RAID controller as an additional avenue to add-on IDE drives, unless in a RAID 0/1/0+1 configuration. Hence, unless you intend to RAID your drives, this controller will be of no real value.
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