SATA Raid Card

[RangerJoe]

alright. since newegg has that deal going on for raptors, im going to buy two of them.

i have two options.

buy two of them, and use my normal onboard SATA, and trade my brother, because he has an IDE 120gb WD drive, instead of the SATA that I have.

or I can spend $60-$90 on a sata raid card, and keep my sata 120, and all that.

if i go and get the raid card, which one should i get?

[larva]

I bought one of these from newegg for $21:

http://images10.newegg.com/productimage/15-104-219-05.JPG

http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=15-104-219&catalog=73&manufactory=BROWSE&depa=1

Finally a way to get a $21 dollar product for $21. This uses the popular Silicon Image 3112a chip, which works well. I'm running the card with two 80GB Hitachi Deskstar 7k250 drives in RAID 0 under Win2K (no ICH5-R RAID under 2K, and I hate XP). PCMark2002 HD score is 2200. Impressively fast in practice, card has it's own bios setup routine or you can configure via SI's windows-based software configuration utility.

http://www.theforumisdown.com/uploadfiles/1203/ibmraid0.jpg

Pretty spiffy stuff considering it is quiet, and currently costs $72x2 + $21=$165. The only downside is the PCI bus limits transfer rates to 122MB/s, but as the drives can only sustain 118MB/s this is a tiny factor in reality.

[wilhelm310]

Dang i might pick one of these up n run 2x seagate 80gb SATA hey larva will it hurt performance at all? cause i dont wanna get a new board if all i need is this