Question about Raid

[Tae]

Even though my Asus A7N8X has Sata and Raid, I have never bothered. Now I am building a new PC and have bought 2 identicle SATA drives (320gb) and I am also planning to use my existing ATA100's 300gb and 200gb drives in the new system.

It has been recommended that I put XP on a SATA drive because they are faster, but it there really any benefit to Raid 0? And is setting up Raid a hassle?

With these four drives, what do you recommend? Should I put the two new SATA's in Raid and still put the OS on them?

I am using a DFI ultra D mb.

Thanks

[drizzt81]

Even if you have indetical drives, you don't need to put them into RAID. Whether or not RAID setup is a hassle, depends on the person setting it up. Installing windows to a RAIDed partition is slightly more complicated than installing it to a regular disk. Depending on the user's experience, this may or may not be difficult to do.

RAID-0 has benefits in certain applications. In others it may derease performance. All in all, I would not recommend running it, but you need to make up your own mind.

[-(Xyphox)-]

Even if you have indetical drives, you don't need to put them into RAID. Whether or not RAID setup is a hassle, depends on the person setting it up. Installing windows to a RAIDed partition is slightly more complicated than installing it to a regular disk. Depending on the user's experience, this may or may not be difficult to do.

RAID-0 has benefits in certain applications. In others it may derease performance. All in all, I would not recommend running it, but you need to make up your own mind.

Great Point there, RAID can be a pain to install on if the user does not know really what he/she is doing. And i try to stay away from a software drivren raid, hardware raid is the way to go.

[djnes]

RAID-0 has benefits in certain applications. In others it may derease performance. All in all, I would not recommend running it, but you need to make up your own mind.
Agreed, unless you think your e-wang is too small and you need some hype to build it back up. ;)

[-(Xyphox)-]

Agreed, unless you think your e-wang is too small and you need some hype to build it back up. ;)

rofl... best post today so far

Yeah Baby I run RAID! I Rock!!!
:rolleyes:

[Tae]

Thanks for the responses. I am not a novice when it comes to software and PC's, so I am sure I could figure out how to do all this, but unless you are using Raid for fault tolerance, I just never saw the point. I was jsut wondering if you would notice a performance increase, because it seems that is why people do it these days.

[Seated]

RAID has been the cool thing to do with the computer enthusiast crowd.

Basically, RAID 0 is great when reading and writing sequently to large files. For instance, I do a lot of audio recording. The files get up to 500-600 meg. RAID 0 helps considerably with this sort of thing. Now if you have a lot of small files, you won't see much, of any performance increase. Possibly a slight decrease depending on the RAID controller that you are using.

For me at least, I do RAID 1 on every system I build just because I cannot afford a hard drive failure. The last system I built has two WD 74 gig raptors setup in RAID 1 for the OS and programs, and then 4 WD 320 gig drives in a RAID 0 + 1 configuration for speed and fault tolerance.

[Tae]

Well. I might see a benefit then because I like to encode Divx. My Xbox is connected to my PC and used as a Media Center, so I encoded many of my DVD's and serve them from my PC.

Looks like I will need to look into this more and not just write it off.

[drizzt81]

if you are encoding DivX and your process is I/O limited there is a good chance that having the source on disk A and the output being written to disk B will be faster than using disks A and B in RAID-0.