2 different 200gig drives (raid?)

[topslop1]

I have two different brand 200 gigabyte harddrives. One is a seagate and the other is a maxtor. Is it possible to do a raid array with them with an onboard raid controller ? What kind of benefits would I see from raid? And what kind of raid should I do ?

I am primarily a gamer although I am copying and pasting raring and unzipping large files and movies etc in and out and deleting large files off (5-10gigs)

Is raid worth it? What kind of raid would I benefit from? And finally, I also have another 150 gig harddrive running with my windows 7 installation. Would I want the 2 gigs in raid to be my windows installation because it will be much faster than just the one drive ?

Thanks for putting up with a random jumble of questions. Thanks guys.

 

[Dangman]

Yes you can RAID two different manufacturer drives with an onboard RAID controller. The benefits depends on what RAID type you want to use. If you want straight up performance at the risk of potential data loss if one of the drives die, then RAID 0. If you want just want some uptime if one of the drives do die, then RAID 1.

As for which drives you should use, it depends on the following:
- What model is that 150GB drives
- What models are those 200GB drives

 

[topslop1]

Okay:

The 200 gigs consist of:

1 Seagate 7200.2 (ide)
1 Diamondmax plus 9 (ide)

The 150 gig is a:

Diamondmax 20 sata.


What's my best bet/estimated thoroughput? I'd do Raid 0 I don't particularly care about what's on the drives.

 

[Dangman]

Okay:

The 200 gigs consist of:

1 Seagate 7200.2 (ide)
1 Diamondmax plus 9 (ide)

The 150 gig is a:

Diamondmax 20 sata.


What's my best bet/estimated thoroughput? I'd do Raid 0 I don't particularly care about what's on the drives.

More than likely, that SATA drive will still be a tad faster than the 200GB RAID 0 since 1) they're IDE, 2) they're old drives, and 3) RAID 0 of IDE drives do tend to be lower than that of RAID 0 SATA drives.

 

[topslop1]

Gotcha. But putting the 2 IDEs together is still going to help throughoutput no matter correct? I'm thinking leave my W7 installation alone on the 150, and then run the games / movie files off of the 200's in raid?

And if I have a bunch of information on the Diamond max 9 that's already on the computer, and I want to make an exact copy of that onto the Seagate for Raid how do I do that without comprimising / wiping the 2 200's ?

 

[topslop1]

I'm putting the 200's info onto a spare 150 (2nd 150) and then putting the 200's in raid. Is a software raid better than hardware raid or?

 

[Dangman]

Gotcha. But putting the 2 IDEs together is still going to help throughoutput no matter correct? I'm thinking leave my W7 installation alone on the 150, and then run the games / movie files off of the 200's in raid?

And if I have a bunch of information on the Diamond max 9 that's already on the computer, and I want to make an exact copy of that onto the Seagate for Raid how do I do that without comprimising / wiping the 2 200's ?

Yes RAID 0 IDE drives should be a step up from a single IDE drive. If you're gonna put any files on a RAID 0 array, just make sure that any valuable or priceless data is backed up on another hard drive, server, external drive, NAS, etc.

For a RAID 0, you're gonna have to either put the data on another drive (as you did already it looks like) or lose it altogether when the RAID array is being setup.

I'm putting the 200's info onto a spare 150 (2nd 150) and then putting the 200's in raid. Is a software raid better than hardware raid or?

Are you talking about creating the RAID array within Windows or using the motherboard's onboard RAID controller when you're talking about software RAID?

OH and Hardware RAID is usually better for RAID 5 and above. For RAID 0 and RAID 1, the onboard fakeRAID on the motherboard will be enough.

 

[topslop1]

I think that this motherboard only supports Raid through SATA not IDE which I'm using. I didn't find any options in the bios to set the drives to raid so I think I'm out of luck there. I think the next best option is to do dynamic disks settings within windows. I searched google for information on how to set up dynamic disks with Windows 7 but I saw no results. Where do I need to go to set up dynamic disks within W7?

I'm on a ta790gxb biostar board.

 

[topslop1]

Ide raid is not supported as I've found. So I went ahead and found dynamic disks finally under windows 7. I right clicked on the drive and set it to dynamic disk along with the other 200 gig'r. However, there was not option to set striped or mirror'd etc. And when I go under computer properties to check out the two disks one is empty and the other still holds all the info on it that i originally had. Is it set up properly or is there another step I need to take other than it being listed as "Dynamic". Any kind of walkthrough for setting up windows dyanmic drives in windows 7 would be greatly appreciated.