Hi;
I have owned the system with the P5AD2-E Premium for nearly 5 years, and have used a RAID 0 configuration on the Silicon Image 3114R controller.
I also have a stand-alone SATA drive on the Intel ICH6R controller.

I am installing a new hard drive, with 32MB cache (compared to the 8MB the current drives have) as the main drive. I will partition this drive for Win XP Pro and Win 7 Ultimate, plus another partition for data and additional programs if needed.

I am not going to use RAID for the new setup, and am wondering whether I should put this drive on the Silicon Image 3114R or the Intel ICH6R controller for the best performance.
I will retain at least one other drive in the system for backup purposes. Performance of this drive is not particularly important.

Any advice?

Thanks

FW

Install Windows 7 first, then Windows XP Pro... I would put it on the Intel ICH6R... but both are so old that it really doesn't matter much... you probably have as much experience with it as anybody on this forum.

Isn't the order of installation of the two OS's supposed to be oldest first?
If I install Win 7 before XP, the XP install will overwrite the boot files and Win 7 will no longer be accessible, no?

I really have no choice of what controller to use. The board has only the two.
So, I'll use the ICH6R, and leave the old system on the Silicon Image controller.
That way, I can leave the RAID system up and available until my new install is running.
All I have to do to change the boot drive is go to the BIOS and change the HDD selections.
I have been doing that for a while, with another copy of XP on the ICH6R while the main copy is on the SIL3114 RAID.

Once I get the new setup running, I'll change the 3114 to standard SATA and re-partition the drives on it.

FW

When I tried to setup Win7 on the SATA drive on ICH6R, the setup could not find the disk.
It only found the old disks that were on the SIL3114 (which was configured as RAID).

I ended up switching the new drive to the SIL3114 and setting the controller to SATA mode.
This is working fine now.

FW

Yes. You're exactly right. Raybay's advice is wrong