SATA HDD Question

[Damnatory]

BTW, sorry for putting this in your thread, damnatory, it was just that that one comment of lynx's caught my attention, and it seemed stupid to start a thread to ask him about a post in this thread.

No worries, your problems ultimately end up being solutions to problems I am bound to run into. It was SATA related anyway, all the information I can get the better off I'll be. :p

[lynx]

'tis an old board (relatively speaking) and sata wasn't quite what it is today, so I guess some manufacturers would employ unorthodox solutions back then, since they hadn't learned how to do it yet.

Sorry, I assumed you were talking about setting it up with this board (or something like it).

Will a regular sata controller be able to read a drive that has previously been running as striped, even though it is only the one disc?

It probably depends on thether the raid controller needed to "prepare" the disk. If it did, then it is unlikely that another SATA controller will read the data. Even if it didn't there is a possibility that it isn't addressing the disk in the standard format. However, another RAID controller may read it, it depends on how much standardisation there is in raid formats these days, but there's no shortage of controllers now.

Edit: there's one thing that's for certain. If he loses his data YOU are going to get it in the neck.

[Snee]

Sorry, I assumed you were talking about setting it up with this board (or something like it).

I started off wondering why I could set it up as a one-disc array at all, on any mobo, 'cos I'd heard the same thing you said before, and you do seem to have tried this a bit more than me. Sorry.

Might be the same thing with the promise controller on the Asus mobo, though.

At any rate this is very informative, so thanks for that.

It probably depends on thether the raid controller needed to "prepare" the disk. If it did, then it is unlikely that another SATA controller will read the data. Even if it didn't there is a possibility that it isn't addressing the disk in the standard format. However, another RAID controller may read it, it depends on how much standardisation there is in raid formats these days, but there's no shortage of controllers now.

Edit: there's one thing that's for certain. If he loses his data YOU are going to get it in the neck.

Not really, 'cos I told him I wanted to keep on trying another way, but he went and installed stuff on it, and now he won't let me try again 'cos it might spoil his precious data. Even though I told him it might not be good.

I don't think the controller had to write (much?) to, or do anything to the disc, the array was set up in a jiffy, no extra drivers were needed and there was absolutely zero waiting, and as far as I can tell the controller didn't use any space on the disc by itself.

When I activated it in windows however, it told me it was striped and wanted to partition and format it accordingly. So now it's set up as two "simple" partitions on a dynamic disc, whatever the hell that is.

[EDit: It even says the card allows for one-drive striped arrays in the (separate) sata manual for the mobo, so I think this may be the only way it's intended to work (at least I think it says that, bloody furriners is all I'm saying). But it's still odd though.]


Oh and damnatory, in case you missed it, you might want to get the discwizard thing I linked you to from my earlier post, that piece of software might be kinda' useful with the seagate drive in conjunction with the via controller. Just in case windows has trouble with it on its own.