2 Baracudas to Raid 0

[gerbiaNem]

So here is the deal, my friend "found" two 80GB Seagate Baracuda 7200rpm 8mb cache PATA drives at work and decided to let me have them. They are the exact same drive. I was planning on raid 0ing them on my new MSI Neo4 Ultra, but how?

I was originally going to have each of them on their own IDE channel for best performance, but I decided to get a Benq 1640 ATA burner for performance/price reasons instead of the Plex 716, so the burner has to go somewhere.

I know a lot of people say that raid 0 is useless, but I do a lot of big file transfers and it can't hurt. I also have a 250 Maxline III and a Hitachi 80GB SATAII (might buy another one for raid later) drive on the way so this array will be backed up (don't really care about data loss).

So my question is this... What is the fastest configuration for IDE raid with 2HDs and a DVD burner? I've heard that setting the drives on the same channel is murder (can only write to one at a time), but a hd and dvd on one channel limits the drive to the dvd access mode (like pio). So will the hd and dvd on one channel slow down the array? Also, on an nforce4 board, can I install windows and hook the drives in later to setup nvraid?

 

[unhappy_mage]

You could get an offboard IDE controller for the dvd drive. That would solve the problem handily.

I ran a raid 0 with both drives on the same cable for a while. I got around 60 MB/s reads/writes, with a single drive doing about 35, so that's not too bad. The array was only used over 10/100, though, so I've since broken it and moved to raid 1. In any case, it should work (no data corruption), perhaps slower than with the drives on seperate channels, but still fast.