ive been told that a raid setup will improve my computers performance,but all i know about it is that you need two identical hard drives...i currently have a 40gb ata main drive and a 120gb ata drive for storage...i have a few questions if anyone can help
1-do i need 2 identical drives to set up raid ?
2-will it work with ata drives
3-can i keep the storage drive aswell?
4-do the raid drives go on one ata cable?
5-is it worth it?

regards mark

 

1) yes
2) it will work with ATA drives IF and only IF you have n ata raid controller.
mine has, its called GigaRaid... check if your motherboard supports is 1st!
3) you wipe both drives blank and then it thinks both drives are one... so 2x 40gb = 1x 80gb disk appearing in My Computer
4) doesnt matter
5) depends if you really need that kinda HDD performance...

i'd say if youre gonna do it, do it wth SATA drives... i bought 2x 160gb sata drives for less than 100quid...

 

ps people are talking about a RAID 0 setup... it means that you effectvely double the theoreticl max bandwith to/from the disks in an ideal situation...

so you got say sata 150... you could THEORETICALLY get a max bandwith of 300mbsec from the drives... each drive working at 150... in practice its never that good tho... as the chances of having exactly half the data on each drive is small...

there are many types of raid... normally its used for redundancy (ie raid1, raid5) so if 1 disk fails the system still works... raid 0 supports no redundancy, and if one of your disks fails, you will lose ALL your data (inc. the stuff that was on the good disk)

 

cheers jim...i was just about to ask you about the different typrs of raid...which do i go for ??? i know some mirror the drives,but dont understand it all..i want to improve my machine for counterstrike mainly and also video editing as it seems to slow down.

regards mark

 

wont affect cstrike very much mate, as it caches everythng it needs in the ram, so dont really access the HDD in-gme

 

Raid 0, isn’t that normally a drive mirror for redundancy?

 

RAID 1 is mirrored drives so if 1 drive fails, you won't lose all your stuff

 

as per alan... 1 is mirrored, 0 is striped...

 

OK cool, yes your right that does ring a bell

 

the different numbers confuse the life out of me too dont worry

 

I use a Gigabyte motherboard with 2 serial ATA drives striped for max speed and back everything important up on a spare internal ata133 drive.

Like Jim said you will need a raid compatible motherboard and will have to load the raid drivers during the windows instalation.

Mark

 

RS2300 4x4, exactly the same setup as me