OK, I am about to try my 2nd Plextor 760a after the 1st one stopeed readind pressed DVD. Having read the posts regarding Plextor compatability problems with NVIDIA IDE drivers I have cleaned them out and returned to good old MS IDE drivers.

Snag is, I want to run the NVIDIA RAID setup for a couple of SATA's and I can't get a mirrored drive combo to work in XP after setting up the array in BIOS. I am pretty sure its because I am not using the NVIDIA IDE drivers as per the support guide.

My current setup is as follows -

Primary IDE Master - LG 4167 DVD Burner
Primary IDE Slave - NEC 4550 Burner
Secondary IDE Master - 120GB Hard Drive
Secondary IDE Slave - Free (for the Plextor to go)

SATA 1 300GB New Drive Slot
SATA 2 - 300GB New Drive Slot
SATA 3 - Existing Drive
SATA 4 - Existing Drive

So my plan is to put the Plextor on the Secondary Slave slot and have my new mirrored SATA RAID array on SATA 1/2

A snapshot of my current IDE drivers is shown. Can anyone help with which driver is which here so I know which ones to convert to the NVIDIA IDE drivers whilst retaining the MS ones for the standard IDE channels?

Are you sure that raid controller need nvidia drivers? In my mobo s-ata controller is a silicon something, not nvidia (my mobo is asus a7n8x deluxe). So IDE drivers and s-ata drivers are different.

The nVidia driver installation asks if you want to install them and the text in the background there states that you must install them, if you want to use RAID.

However, I don't know if you need them for the controller channel not involved in RAID and I don't know if it's possible to use different drivers for each channel.

I am using PX-716 and have a SATA RAID0 and the 716 is running fine with the nVidia IDE drivers.

Regards,
weaker

I have the nVidia SATA drivers installed and MS PATA drivers installed on my review PC.
It works just fine.
Install the nVidia IDE drivers when you install the main nForce drivers. After you reboot, go into device manager and select the PATA contoller/update drivers. Select "roll back drivers" and from the list select the MS drivers. (reboot and your done)

• Motherboard: ASUSTeK A8N-SLI DELUXE (nForce 4 SLI chipset)
• Processor: AMD Athlon 64 3500+ (Venice) 1000 MHz Hyper Transport
• RAM: 2 GB Corsair TWINX 2CL DDR
• GFX: Leadtek Winfast 6600 TD (PCI Express nVidia)
• Sound: SoundBlaster Audigy 2
• Hard disk: 1X 200GB Seagate Barracuda (SATA): 1X 120GB Maxtor (SATA).

Thanks for the tip. How can I tell which set of Primary / Secondary and Dual controllers are working the IDE channels and which ones are running the 4 SATA ports? Is it always the first set as it looks like in your screenshot?

SATA are listed as "Serial ATA"

Yes but only after you are starting with the NVIDIA setup. If like me you have reverted to MS drivers for all channels you don't get the same labels in Control Panel (as per my attached screenshot).

Anyway, I figured it out now and the RAID array now works OK.

Now if only this Plextor drive will work properly...... I just got 2 hard crashes after loading Plextools Pro. I have now upgraded to v 2.3.2 and it seems OK now.

Time will tell.........