A7N8X DLX and S-ATA drives?

[willy1]

Is anyone around here using an Asus A7N8X-DLX with Serial-ATA drives ?

I'm looking for more fault tolerance than my single (failed) IDE drive provided (DUH!).
The board has the Sil-3112a S-ATA chipset, so I plan to run two drives in RAID 1 mode. It doesn't specifically state that it will boot from the S-ATA drives, but I'm assuming it will ? Maybe have to load drivers at OS (Win 2K Pro) install time as for SCSI?

Any recommendations on drive brand? My choices are WD Caviars or Seagate Barracudas.

Any info gladly appreciated. I'm planning on picking up the drives tomorrow, since I need to get this running again ASAP.

[vaughan]

I have a Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 80 GB SATA drive (model: ST380013AS) running on this motherboard. OS is WinXP Home SP2. I tried running a pair of them in RAID 1 config but it was VERY unstable - kept forgetting that it was setup properly and I had to repair the SATA config frequently and re0install WIndows multiple times. In the end I gave up and took the 2nd drive out, re-installed Win for the umpteenth time - you load the SATA drivers from a floppy when prompted during the start of Windows installation. Its been stable now for about a month 24/7.
Hope you have better luck with RAID 1 than I did.
Vaughan

[willy1]

The experiment has been a success so far.

I installed a pair of 120GB Barracudas in a RAID1 set, and everything worked great. I made sure that I updated the MB BIOS to the latest (1008) and got the reference drivers for the Sil-3112A S-ATA chipset. The hardest part of the install was kicking the floppy drive to life - it's amazing how we all get along without those any more. A little alchohol and Q-tip action on the gunked-up and dusty heads was all it took.

We'll see how all this goes after it runs for a bit.