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Setting up a RAID on a D900T?

post #1 of 5
5/30/10 at 11:17am
Thread Starter 
This is a bit specialist…

I have a Clevo D900T laptop.

It has two Serial ATA HDDs running under a mirrored RAID.

These disks are now too small. I have obtained from Clevo a cable that will plug into the mother board and connect to two large capacity PARELLEL ATA discs.

Everything will fix together and I am assured that the mother board will support both SATA and PATA HDDs.

However before installing these disks I have reviewed the documentation for installing the OS.

The fist thing that has to be done is to install the RAID. At some point the installation programme will ask me to select the appropriate RAID Controller. There are only two options (apparently) both are for SATA disks but my new ones are PATA disks.

I suspect the new cable is a conversion cable so selecting the Windows XP SATA version of the raid controller will work.

Can anyone confirm this or offer any other advice.
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post #2 of 5
5/30/10 at 1:29pm
I am not familiar with connector to hook a PATA drive to a SATA controller on the notebook. Providing that it would work, you might want to be sure to get the appropriate sata drivers for XP first.

cheers ...
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post #3 of 5
5/30/10 at 7:54pm
Thread Starter 
Thanks for your response qhn.

I have attached a photo of the new cable. This clearly fits onto the same socket on the motherboard as the present PATA cable connects into.

The two upper connectors clearly match the pins on the new SATA drives.

Does this help?

D900T SATA HDD Cable.jpg
LL
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post #4 of 5
5/31/10 at 5:50am
Cool. You would need SATA drivers before installing XP. Check BIOS and Sager to see if they offer RAID controller app to make the installation easier.

cheers ...
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post #5 of 5
6/1/10 at 3:33am
First, you don't need the 'raid' that these mobos provide. The promise controller doesn't actually do hardware raid, just 'soft raid', which basically means, the raid controller just stores the raid array configuration, for the windows software driver, which has to handle all of the raid stuff.

Next, when switching from pata->sata, you have to do a reinstall(obviously), which just requires a usb disk or usb floppy drive with the drivers on it. I suggest running the bios setting of ata instead of raid.

Finally, having done the exact transition you are, the sata functionality of this mobo vs the ata functionality, the ata is more solid. On sata, I am constantly having ata read errors (sata and pata use the same ata command set), when flip-flopping to pata instead, it works well.

This post written with a BAC > Legal to drive.
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