The layout of the PX845PE Pro IIS is very similar to the PX845G that we looked at. One thing that may be important to those of you with small cases – this board is definitely on the large side. It’s a good two inches or so wider than my Abit BD7-II. The main ATX power connector is still placed on the right and away from the HSF, though the ATX +12V connector is on the left. It’s placed there on just about all motherboards though, so that may be unavoidable. In any case that cable is much easier to move away from the heatsink than the main cable, so it’s not really a problem. The floppy connector and main IDE channels are directly below the ATX power connector and are within easy reach of CD-Rom drives. The single ATA-133 raid connector and two SATA connectors are located near the bottom of the board. This is one of the design issues. The vertical SATA 1 connector is directly in front of PCI slot 4, so if you have a hard drive connected there, no PCI card will fit. Since these connectors are so small, I have to wonder why they couldn’t just be placed at the bottom and out of the way.
Implementation of Raid on the board is somewhat unusual. As I stated earlier, there are two SATA connectors, and a single ATA-133 connector, allowing a maximum of three connected hard drives (the ATA-133 connector will not recognize a slave drive). Those of you familiar with Raid will know that it takes at least two drives for a Raid 0 (stripe) array, and two for a Raid 1 (mirror) array. A maximum of 3 drives rules out the possibility of Raid 0+1. The ATA-133 connector is really there just as an extra non-Raid controller for a single hdd, though you can use it in combination with one of the SATA ports for a Raid array if you wish. Also, since you have to use at least one SATA controller for Raid, I would have liked to have seen an included “Serillel” SATA to ATA-133 adapter, since there are still no SATA hard drives available. That means that with today’s hard drives, you cannot connect and setup a Raid disk array with the included equipment. Unfortunately, it seems that this is the case with just about all motherboards with SATA controllers. The ONLY board I’ve seen that comes with a Serillel adapter is Abit’s IT7 Max2 V.2.
