Thinking of raid setup, PLEASE help....

[mkfosgate]

First of all, I do a lot of filesharing, and the 60, 80GB drives I have are maxed out. My motherboard is an ECS K7VZA ver.3. I also have a 1.4ghz amd athlon xp. I was wondering first if this motherboard will recognize a raid controller because I hear some people talking about motherboards not liking them or seeing them right.

Second is, will setting my comp in raid kill the overall performance of it when using it normally ie:word, internet and such.

Third, can each raid card see 4 drives because of the ide cable having 2 ide spots on it?

Fourth, I see you can do raid 0 which is probably the best in my case since these are going to be used for JUST files for filesharing. But, can you make it so that when you save something, you can save that file onto just one of the disks?

Fifth, if I got a raid card that you put into a pci slot, and has sata ports on it, can i still use that on my motherboard even though there is no sata ports on my motherobard itself? Would windows recognize all of this, or should I just reformat and reinstall and let windows take care of it?

And finally last, with all of the things in my case, should I upgrade to a 550watt power supply? I think i have a 350 or 400 antec right now. Even if I upgraded, would there be enough connectors? What do you guys do when you dont have enough connectors?

[Nebuchadnazzar]

first
you might have a few issues with compatibility, i'd check what people say about the raid card you are looking to buy. I'm using a promise TX2000 with an Epox mobo and i had to revert back the original firmware for the card for it to work properly.

second
If anything those operations should be quicker, i've been running raid-0 for a long time and i see no slowdown for small applications.

third
yes, my card has 2 IDE connectors allowing me to use 4 harddrives plugged into it.

fourth
In raid-0 all data is split/seperated into small chunks and saved onto both disks.
Keep in mind that raid-0 sees only 1 large harddrive, and it will act the same. This means that you can't seperate the drives and use them independently without losing all the data that was stored on them.

fifth
If you got a PCI card with Sata connectors you can use Sata harddrives since data is transfered through the PCI bus and not the motherboard ide/sata connectors. This means that you will need to purchase Sata harddrives for your Sata card.

last
It depends on what system you are running like CPU, videocard, number of drives, etc. Usually power supplies have plenty of power, unless you are overclocking and need very reliable power.
I have a 450w enermax power supply and it didn't have enough connectors so i used 4pin Molex Y-splitters, which splits one connector into 2.

When looking at power supplies take a look at the 12volt rail's max current because that's often a major factor. the supply i'm using has 33A max on the 12volt rail, but really you probably only need something in the 20+A range. there are also powersupplies with two 12volt rails with power ratings for each one, ie: 18A rail1, 16A rail2. Which is still plenty of power, just make sure you evenly use dongles from each rail.

[mkfosgate]

Ok, you answered all of my questions. The only thing im stuck on is the part with compatibility. I honestly dont see hardly anyone using the same board as i am. How do i know if a certain card will work?

[ajrettke]

I would just go with a standard large HDD. Your not very familar with RAID it seems and you do know that if your controller dies or corrupts, or if either drive in the RAID 0 array fail you will lose ALL your information?

[Galt]

What makes you think you need RAID and not just a single large drive? I don't really see any benefit for you to go for RAID, especially RAID 0.

Usually, I'm all for people learning new things and trying them out. RAID is one of the few things that I, begrudgingly, say that people should stay away from unless they know what they're doing. The risk of losing all your data is usually just too great for the marginal gain of RAID 0. Again, what leads you believe that you need RAID? If you need more disk space, the best possible option for you is simply to buy a new drive.