Hello. I have a few questions. I plan to get a P4P800-E Deluxe to upgrade my mythtv backend/file server. My plan is to pop in 4 500GB SATA drives and run software raid 5 on them. I understand the P4P800-E Deluxe has the intel ICH5R which I can use for two of the drives, and the Promise 20378 controller, which I can use for the other two. The main question I have is in regards to the last few posts on xp_newbie's thread(thread id 499811, this is my first post so no url's), about support for both SATA and PATA in the same system. Really, though, my only concern is being able to use 4 SATA drives and a cd/dvd drive (to install from - once the system is up and running I won't need the cd/dvd drive on it). I'm guessing (and hoping) that this will work but I want to be as sure as I can be before I start plopping down money for this.

Now, one thing that I thought about was if I used raid 5 across all 4 disks, does it install the boot loader on the master boot record of all 4, or just the first? My fear is if the first disk goes bad, would it even be able to boot after I replaced the drive? If this might be a problem a solution could be to just use a PATA drive to install the OS on and use the 4 SATA disks as a big storage array, although from this thread it sounds like that might not be doable.

I plan to install Redhat Fedora Core 6 on this. Does anyone foresee any problems with my proposed setup?

Thanks!

Run them(P4P800) in Dual Linear mode(Dual DDR/identical pair of RAM) to make it smooth.

I have Adaptec 29320 on my P4C800, good and dandy RAID