[TriLUG] RAID Ignoramus with Questions..

[Brian Henning]

Hi Y'all,
  I'll be setting up my very first RAID-1 array in a week (hopefully, if we 
can ever get our motherboard...but that is a different story).  From reading 
the mobo specs, it looks like each drive in the RAID array has to be on its 
own IDE channel (i.e. one on primary, one on secondary).  My question is 
thus:  As such, is it okay to have another device as the slave on one of 
those channels, or do the channels have to only have the RAID disks on them? 
Would I be sacrificing any/much performance to have, for example, the 
DVD/CD-RW drive as the slave of one of the two IDE channels?  Or would I be 
better off slapping a PCI IDE controller in there for the removable media? 
Fortunately I do have one of those on hand.

For the graphically-minded, here's my question in the form of a diagram:

Is this okay:
IDE1 ------ M -- HD (RAID-1 drive 1)
             \--- S -- DVD/CD-RW
IDE2 ------ M -- HD (RAID-1 drive 2)
             \--- S -- nothing

Or would I be better off doing this:
IDE1 ------ M -- HD (RAID-1 drive 1)
             \--- S -- nothing
IDE2 ------ M -- HD (RAID-1 drive 2)
             \--- S -- nothing
IDE3 ------ M -- DVD/CD-RW
             \--- S -- nothing
(where IDE3 is the primary channel of a pci ide controller)

Thank you muchly!
~Brian

----------------
Brian A. Henning
Strutmasters.com
866.597.2397
----------------