asus laptop g50vt-x5 raid 0 with 3 hard drives :) is it possible

hi my name is james i own a g50vt i have two 250 gb harddrives in raid 0
my question is can i add a third drive and do raid 0 with 3 hdd.
i dont care about losing data due to the increased amount of danger of running 3 drives without a back up.
i have purchased a 12.7 optical bay hard drive caddy and already have a 250 hdd waiting to go in.
it has not arrived yet so i was wondering is this possible or just a dream

 

anyone please

 

speculation welcome

 

i don't think there's enough physical space for 3 hdd's in that chassis. so it'll probably not happen.

 

replace the optical bay with a hdd caddy thats where its going so there will be know dvd drive.but im wondering if it will be able to join my raid array

 

For something like that you really should be looking at a desktop.

 

ok i have the laptop and i am wondering if this is possible.
i have the parts coming but there not here yet i just wanted to know if the sata connection the dvd drive uses will allow me to get raid 0 running threw it




i cant use a desktop on the bus.

 

hi my name is james i own a g50vt i have two 250 gb harddrives in raid 0
my question is can i add a third drive and do raid 0 with 3 hdd.
i dont care about losing data due to the increased amount of danger of running 3 drives without a back up.
i have purchased a 12.7 optical bay hard drive caddy and already have a 250 hdd waiting to go in.
it has not arrived yet so i was wondering is this possible or just a dream

link to the caddy

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/New-Laptop-12...es_HardDriveEnclosures_RL&hash=item414eb83bd8

 

I don't think anyone on this forum has tried, hence the lack of response in your thread. However, please do let us know upon your testing. It would be interesting to see if RAID-0 with 3 hard drives would work.

 

ok will do hope it works lol im worried about the dvd drives sata being restricted in speed

 

Well, there's only 2 types of interface available for the optical bay: IDE or SATA. I believe the G50V uses SATA which would be the best, but you should double check before hand.

Note: ATAPI = IDE

 

You can't raid on more than the two internal sata connections, because they are off the Intel ICH7 controller. You can run software raid though.

Edit: LOL I just read the last page... you want to do this with the SATA port for the DVD? That might work *in theory* but it's restricted by the BIOS (in two ways -- not only on the controller side but in the power on self test). Your system will probably not boot without an optical drive in that port, there was a thread about that somewhere.

 

i never thought the power would be a probem.
i hope it is not i think 2.5 sata hdds use 5v so should not be too stressfull on the laptop i hope.

 

I mean the power on self-test (POST), not actual power in voltage

The BIOS has something hard coded in the initialization that looks for an optical drive on that port, I tried taking out my optical drive in my G50V and it wouldn't boot, so I'm not sure you'll be able to boot if you replace it with a hard drive somehow.

Good luck.

 

ALLurGroceries

you were 100 % correct i got it today put it in jumping with joy turn on my laptop bios found the drive wooohoo then it said please insert proper boot media or some sh=t like that i was so #d off
me NOT A HAPPY CHAPPY how can i put some data on my hdd so it tricks the bios into thinkiong it has a optical drive.

 

I think you would need either an updated BIOS (I think it's a bug) or a BIOS mod to get around that, since it's probably doing some sort of ATAPI commands to probe the firmware of the drive in the boot sequence. It's a pretty bad design decision -- for example your computer won't boot if your optical drive dies.

 

what member shoud i contact into getting some help with this

 

g50vt has an option in the bios to select what the optical drive port is used for... (IIRC)

Optical or Hard Drive... take a look...


~MG~

*edit, be sure to take the optical drive out of the boot order as well... it will make notebook angry ;-)

 

madgoat i tried it but failed to find that option still cant boot without optical drive in

 

Well just thought Id add my 2 cents in, most likely you won't be able to do this because I believe there are only 2 inputs to the raid controller on your motherboard so if you add the third it won't connect through the controller hence it can't be included in the array. If it were a desktop and had more than 2 connectors you could easily do this because you can connect up to 32 drives on raid 0 if you have enough raid cards. Sorry but looks like your out of luck however that would be silly fast if it was possible

 

Oh and another thing if you are looking to get more speed from your laptop maybe wait until ssd drives come down in price and buy 2 of those and set them in raid 0 ridiculous speed boost

 

IIRC this was the experience of another member here on NBR who attempted RAID 5 via an ODD adapter to get 3HDDs in his G50vt. It would only allow the two internal drives.

I am not sure if you could just do a software RAID in Windows, however.