[Mental_Myopia]

This is probably a dumb nOOb question, but this is driving me nuts:

I'm trying to install the front-mounted firewire port of my Antec Plus1080AMG case to my Asus P4C800-E Deluxe mobo. The Asus manual says I need eight pins, but the Antec lead only has six. The data cables TPA0+, TPA0-, TPB0+, and TPB0- are easy enough to match up. I only have one grounding wire off the port, which I can simply attach to any of the three ground pins. However, the mobo has two +12V pins while the case's port has only one. Does it make any difference as to which +12V pin I put this on? Will the presence of only one power lead make less power available to the port? I feel like I've been put into a round room and told to sit in the corner...

Connecting the front-mounted USB ports onto the USB78 pins was a snap! Out of curiosity, does anyone know if the Antec ports are USB2.0? I can't locate this in any of the literature.

In case anyone's curious, here's what I'm putting into this new system. (My old 900MHz Athlon went nuts recently.):

Antec Plus1080AMG case with optional front fans
Antec 430W ATX 12V TruePower
Asus P4C800-E Deluxe
Intel Pentium 4 2.8GHz, 800MHz FSB
Corsair TWINX1024-3200LLPT 1GB DDR400 (x2)
BMG Tech GeForce4 Ti4200 128MB
Philips PSC706 Acoustic Edge
Maxtor DM+9 6Y080M0 80GB SATA (x2)
Samsung SC-152 and SM-352
Philips 109B 19" CRT

I'll be shopping around for a new GPU, and keeping an eye out for the new Philips PSC805 Aurilium.

My first computer was an AppleIIGS clocked at a whopping 2.8MHz!

I'm assembling the new computer completely in the nude so as to avoid electrical buildup from clothing. I'll be sure to post how things go, and I'll be sure to install my fan guards right away!

 

[Mental_Myopia]

I looked at the leads of the optional firewire module Asus included, and saw that there was only one +12V lead on it as well. This is configured to attach to the pin on the top row, where I had attached the +12V lead from the front panel Antec firewire port. That question is answered now.
:winkgrin:

Now I've got some reading to do to decide on attaching the SATA drives to SATA or RAID...
Too many options are making me crazy!
:tongue2:

 

[clintfan]

Now I've got some reading to do to decide on attaching the SATA drives to SATA or RAID...

(from other thread):
I've never worked with RAID before, and wondered how to configure my two 80GB SATA drives for maximum gaming and music playing performance. I'll most likely have one drive mirror the other in order to keep a complete system backup should the primary drive fail. -Mental_Myopia

Well I don't do RAID, but to do RAID1, which is what you are talking about, it will have to be off the Promise if you use this mobo. The Promise is on your PCI bus. Which will share bus bandwidth with your soundcard (which you need, for "maximum music playing performance"). I'm overlooking some details like where the music buffering occurs, but in terms of "maximum... performance", this isn't going to quite be it.

Further, it occurs to me that because all data has to be written to disk twice, I can't see how this can be maximum performance either. In my mind, RAID1 gives you the benefit of data redundancy but like everything else it isn't free... you pay some performance somewhere.

While I whole heartedly agree that backups are a good thing, I don't expect my brand new HDD's to die any time relatively soon, so I don't want to pay performance penalties from now until then, on every single disk access. Rather, my plan is to buy an external tape backup device ($$$$!) and do regular backups... unfortunately with me, regular has never been regular enough in the past, but that's the plan anyway. I've got the SCSI-U160 card, now I just need the drive.

Hope this helps,

if not then start a RAID-1 thread to get some duscussions going with folks who really know.

-clintfan

 

[Mental_Myopia]

Thanks for the good information!
I'm paranoid with hard drives going bad quickly, but my problems have never been with Maxtor. However, old habits die hard with my hard drive mirroring. LOL

Keeping the PCI bus as free as I can would be beneficial. My goal is to grab the USB-powered Philips PSC805 Aurilium as soon as possible, so perhaps after that time keeping the PCI bus free would be unnecessary. At the moment, I'm leaning towards the boot drive on the regular SATA channel with the other on the RAID SATA channel. Keeping audio files on the Promise controller might give the best performance going to the shound card until I grab the USB sound.

Having 7 drive channels on this mobo is making my head spin. My only IDE devices are the CD drives. Would it be best to put these on the secondary IDE channel rather than the primary? (I know not to put them on the Promise RAID IDE, anyway.)
Thanks for the help!

 

[clintfan]

My only IDE devices are the CD drives. Would it be best to put these on the secondary IDE channel rather than the primary?

No, given the choice I would put them on the Primary. I hear you can run into occasional software-confusion trouble if you have nothing on the Primary, but do have stuff on the Secondary.

And yes, the Promise does not support ATAPI devices.

-clintfan