[Mental_Myopia]

I'm building a system with the P4C800-E, utilizing two new Maxtor 80GB SATA drives. XP Home with NTFS will be used on the primary drive (probably a single partition), which will be used for gaming, music (recording and listening), watching DVD's, and regular computer stuff. The other drive will be a mirror of the primary drive, and might contain the pagefile/VM in a separate partition. Do I even need a pagefile/VM with 2GB of RAM?
What configuration will give me the best possible performance?

I do have a spare WD 40GB IDE ATA133 sitting around if that could somehow be thrown in to improve things in an alternative configuration someone thinks up.

How can I take full advantage of the hard drive options on this motherboard for maximum performance?
Thanks!

 

[Mental_Myopia]

Any ideas from anyone?

 

[clintfan]

Do I even need a pagefile/VM with 2GB of RAM?

Yes. In fact I have read you cannot really turn it off, even though you think you did. Your idea about a separate VM partition is a good one, Blackviper confirms this is only about the second-slowest way to do it, not the slowest. With 2GB RAM you should allow for 4GB for paging, though you can initially set it to 1.5x, or 3GB. I like to set the partition at 5 or 6, using the extra for IE/Netscape Browser cache.

the primary drive (probably a single partition), which will be used for gaming, music (recording and listening), watching DVD's, and regular computer stuff. The other drive will be a mirror of the primary drive, and might contain the pagefile/VM in a separate partition.

Be careful with the term "mirror", as it implies RAID1. Since you're saying the primary drive would have 1 partition, but the second would have 2, the second can't be truly a mirror of the primary.

If you actually do want RAID1 here, I've read the BIOS history which says the latest BIOS 1011 adds RAID1 to these ports, but I don't know how accurate that is. Certainly you'd need to install a new Intel Application Accelerator driver (IAA) too. To be sure of a working RAID1 today you could attach to the Promise SATA_RAID1 & SATA_RAID2 ports, but putting your storage on your PCI won't give the best performance, which is what you said you wanted.

What configuration will give me the best possible performance?...I do have a spare WD 40GB IDE ATA133 sitting around if that could somehow be thrown in to improve things in an alternative configuration someone thinks up.

Put your 40GB on PRI_IDE as master and load the O/S there. Then if you don't plan to do music/video recording, put both your SATA's down on the Promise SATA_RAID1 & 2 (but not in RAID mode). If you want to do recording, I always preach you should put one on Promise (for your main data store) and the other on Southbridge SATA1 (for your recording temp).

Hope this helps,

-clintfan

 

[Mental_Myopia]

The new IAA will not install.
The RAID edition should install, even if I have no RAID set, correct?
My device manager is showing the 82801EB controller, and not the 82801ER controller...

 

[clintfan]

The new IAA will not install.
The RAID edition should install, even if I have no RAID set, correct?

Dang! I was trying to avoid having to learn about this silly IAA thingie! The answer is No, not correct. Here is some stuff I found out about the IAA tonight...

• There's a list of what chipsets support the IAA. At the bottom it states "Note: The Intel Application Accelerator is not compatible with the Intel 875P, 865G/P/PE,...848P...chipset.", in essence all the latest family of 800-MHz FSB chipsets. I think this pretty much answers it for you... you can't install it on P4C800-E Deluxe because it's not compatible. I seem to recall reading elsewhere that it's not even necessary, from a performance standpoint, on the 875P chip.
  UPDATE: this may have been shown to be a typo on Intel's part, and IAA may actually BE supported on these chipsets.
  
• The IAA only supports the RAID controller in ICH5R and will not work with an ICH5 chip. Not that it matters, your P4C800-E Deluxe mobo [should] have an IHC5R in it.
  
• There's an important RAID-only disclaimer here. It says the IAA has now become focused only on SATA RAID, not parallel ATA. Apparently it was not always that way.
  
• For chipsets other than those listed above, there apparently is a RAID IAA version and a non-RAID IAA version. But as stated above, both run only on the ICH5R chip.
  
• The Intel chipset needs to be properly recognized by the O/S prior to installing the IAA. Should you ever need to install the IAA on a different mobo, you should install the Intel Chipset Software Installation Utility first.
  
• Purpose of the IAA is to "replace the ATA drivers that come with Windows with drivers optimized for" the Intel ICH5R chip.
  
• See Intel Application Accelerator for all the other details.

-clintfan

 

[Mental_Myopia]

Wondering why Asus lists it in the drivers section for the P4C800-E...

The current non-RAID IAA is on my old P3 system with the 810e chipset, and has really helped it out. I was hoping for the same for my new system.