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I've just recently taken the leap from IDE drives to sata drives, and now I have 3 250gig western digital ide drives lying around. Wondering what kind of performance benifits I could get by running them in raid, for storage mainly, and swap/virtual memory. I don't know a whole lot about RAID in general, but I believe its striping that I want. Right now Im testing them with windows xp's software raid setup, with the dynamic spanned volume, and although I like the fact that its seems like one big drive, it also seems slower to access via network or locally, and copy/write to. Was beginning to look for a hardware based ide raid controller, but not sure what it is i'm looking for. Basically, best read/write performance, as the raid volume will be my main storage dump, doesnt need reduncancy, hotswapping, or anything like that. Would really like to have it perform great for virtual memory space too. If you guys could reccomend a card, or give me some links to research myself, that'd be great. I also was looking at maybe just buying ide to sata converters, and running the drives in raid via the onboard sata raid controller, but wouldnt a pci or pci-e card be better/faster/less cpu intensive? Thanks again in advance,
Silvano
Silvano