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>Would I be able to use both controllers Intel and Marvell for Raid at the same time?
Yes.
>Which Raid Configuration do you recommend for Video Editing and Animation?
With your motherboard I would recommend a standard boot drive plus a 4-drive
RAID 10 array (data drive) for maximum performance combined with redundancy.
If you used four 500GB drives for the array, the array would be 1TB in
capacity. This would give you a high performance, redundancy protected 1TB
working space for editing video.
>I understand WinXp only supports 3 GB of memory would it be wise to enable
the 4GB switch in the Boot.Ini?
No!!
>And if you recommend this how would I do this? Last round I enabled this
WinXP went into a Infinite loop of reboots!
That is to be expected. WinXP supports 4GB of *physical* memory, as well as
4GB of *virtual address space* (completely different things). Let's deal with
the address space first.
Normally Windows XP 32-bit allocates 2GB of virtual address space for each
running application or process, and 2GB for the kernel. This is true no
matter how much physical RAM you have, from the minimum supported 64MB to the
maximum of 4GB. While running, various portions of virtual address space are
mapped to different parts of physical RAM (DIMMs) or virtual RAM (i.e.
pagefile.sys). Let's say you run 10 applications, each of which is allocated
2GB of virtual address space. Obviously they can't all use that much
*physical* memory, especially if for example you only have 64MB of physical
RAM installed. As each application runs, the memory manager will swap
addresses between the 2GB virtual address space and physical/virtual memory,
allowing each program to *think* it has access to 2GB, (as does Windows
itself), even though there is physically much less.
By using the /3GB switch you describe, you have allocated 3GB to each
application or process, leaving only 1GB for the Windows kernel. Since the
kernel also shares that 1GB space with drivers, and in particular video
drivers for high-end video cards with large amounts of on-board video memory
also allocate large portions of the remaining virtual address space, there
probably isn't enough memory for Windows to run.
Bottom line: The /3GB switch drastically reduces the amount of memory
allocated to Windows. It was designed only for server use with specialized
applications and a bare minimum video and driver set. You should never use
that switch under any normal circumstances.
What about physical memory? 32-bit editions of Windows XP and Vista support
4GB of physical memory. What many don't realize is that PC system hardware
uses some or all of the 4th GB for things like the the BIOS, motherboard
resources, memory mapped I/O, PCI configuration space, device memory
(graphics aperture), VGA memory, etc.
This means that if you install 4GB (or more) RAM, most or all of the 4th GB
would be disabled since it is already occupied. This is called the 3GB limit,
is exactly analogous to the 640K memory limit we had in the '80s. Back then
the system supported 1M, but the upper 384K was already in use by the system.
Can any of that memory be reclaimed? For those running a 32-bit OS the answer
is definitely no. However when running a 64-bit OS on systems that support
remapping, the answer is yes. Most newer motherboard chipsets have a
feature that can remap the otherwise disabled RAM from the 4th GB to the 5th
(or higher) GB, where it will be both visible and usable by a 64-bit OS. Note
however that if the motherboard doesn't support remapping, then even when
running a 64-bit OS the memory will be lost.
Unfortunately, limited 64-bit driver availability as well as the inability to
run legacy 16-bit code means that 64-bit OS are still not recommended for
general use.
Note that the 3GB limit is not as strictly defined as it was with the 640K
limit. This means that if you do install 4GB, you might get to use as much as
3.5GB of it, or possibly as little as 2.85 or less. It depends largely on
the types of buses in the system as well as the type and number of video
cards installed. With a single low-end video card you may
have access to 3.5GB, however on a newer system with dual PCIe
x16 slots, and especially with two high-end PCI Express video cards
installed, you may drop the usable limit to 2.85GB or less. That means that
even if you only install 3GB, you might not be able to use all of it.
Bottom line: When running 32-bit editions of Windows 2000, XP or Vista, I
recommend installing a maximum of 3GB RAM, since most if not all of the 4th
GB will be unusable.
>I own Upgrading and Repairing PC's Version 10-13 and a early Linux upgrading
Book.I am ordering Version 17 from Amazon during the week!! Thank You
Thanks! Be sure to watch the included DVD, Scott.
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