K9AGM2 board and sata problem

Question

Sorry if this sounds stupid. I have just bought and built a system with the K9AGM2 board with 2 sata drives, 2 gig ram and 4200 dual core 64 athlon.
I did a fresh install and because i didn't have a floppy i had to set the sata drives to Standard IDE .
All installled fine but is it true I'm not getting optimal performance out of the in this mode , they do seem a bit sluggish.
I then tried to enable raid in the bios and as it went to the windows loading screen it kept rebooting itself so i assume that's a driver conflict or missing driver.
I looked on the website and there is only a sata floppy disc for when you install xp from disc , is there anyway i can get sata performance from the drives without getting a floppy and reinstalling all the system.
Cheers for any info if you can help.

Answer 1

Hello and welcome!
There's a bit of a myth about SATA-performance in RAID. Using a RAID-0 array (two disks working together, reading/writing at the same time) on an onboard RAID-controller with only two disks is hardly worth the effort. I tried it with many onboard controllers .... and yes, I went back to using two SATA's as stand-alone (IDE) drives. It performs just fine.
If you really want RAID, you cannot convert your existing setup to RAID-0. It is impossible. However, there is a workaround for this and no, you will not need a floppy drive. There is always a risk involved: it could not work, so backup your data.
First of all, you can slipstream a SATA-driver into your Windows Setup CD and use that CD to install Windows: >> read this <<.
Then you could try the following:
1. install the SATA/RAID-driver from MSI's website. Just install it and don't let Windows call off the action. You do need the driver later, although your raid-controller is not active yet.
2. Now, make a full image with a backup program that has good recovery tools. You do need one that has a bootable CD to load the recovery program from. Acronis True Image Home is a good example. NOTE THIS: You need an IMAGE, not a backup!
3a. make the boot-media (backup program);
3b. test the media to see that it actually works;
3c. Look under 4: set RAID temporarily to check that the boot-media recognizes your RAID-controller. If it does not, you can now stop... No use continuing. However, most backup tools will be able to work with the controller.
3d. boot into Windows and make the image from C-drive. It's easiest to do it through a home network to some other PC or on a spare or external HDD.
4. Now, reboot and enter bios -> set SATA-controller to RAID and configure as RAID-0 (you need to save changes to bios first, reboot then and enter SATA setup bios next to configure RAID!);
5. Exit the RAID-config screen and reboot from your backup program's bootup CD.
6. Now, put the image back to your new RAID-drive that you just created. When it's finished, take out all media and reboot. Windows should boot now. If it does not, well, then you weren't lucky.....
I did this a few times and it always worked for me with acronis. Be aware that Norton Ghost is very bad with RAID-controllers!
Be aware that using RAID-0 has a risk:
- if one drive fails, you lose all data! What RAID-0 does is the following: when writing 128kb to a RAID-array that is configured into 32k blocks, it simply chops up the 128kb into 4 x 32kb pieces and writes 2x32kb pieces at the same time to each disk. So, your file is chopped up and laying all over the place... In theory, this should improve performance. In daily live, it hardly does. Not with two disks, that is. With 4 it gets better, but if you want real performance, you need a PCI RAID-controller with it's own cpu and RAM.
So, I wouldn't bother and leave it like it is....
(Is that why I wrote this all down??  )