Raid baby

[Al Capone]

I have Raid on my motherboard (Abit TH7II-RAID), what the hell is it? :D Does it make my hard disk faster?
I have two hardisks:
Quantum Atlas Scsi 9.1Gb (for OS)
IBM deskstar 120gxp/80gb uide100 7200rpm

thanks

[Al Capone]

Can i only use my SCSI in RAID? otherwise i will waste lots of space

[Teacher_Doug]

RAID stands for Redundant Array of Independent Disks. It is a system for linking 2 or 4 discs together into arrays.
It provides fault tolerance (redundancy) and improved access rates.
there are variations on RAID, and rather than explain it here, I suggest

go to this site (http://www.raidweb.com/whatis.html)

[Oni]

RAID (Redundant Array of Independant Disks), in its most common form, takes a whole bunch of hard drives, and tells your OS that they are one big harddrive. This is RAID 0, aka 'striping'

Its usually best to set up a RAID array w/ a certian number of disks that are the exact same size/make/model. I once had a friend who had them down to the exact same batch number!

RAID can greatly increase your speed and storage capacity.

[Teacher_Doug]

Yah Yah, :p I got mine in first :D

I agree with yours Oni :)

[Al Capone]

so if i have one hard disk 9gb and the other 80gb, will I have a total of 18GB with RAID??

[Jon]

Yes, but the RAID controller you have on board is useless with a SCSI and IDE drive. Those controllers can only be used with 2+ IDE drives attached to them.

If using NT, Win2K or XP you can make software RAID arrays with your drives, but the performance would probably be worse than the SCSI drive alone.

[Al Capone]

So if i have two identical IBM deskstars 120gxp 80gb and a Scsi hard disk for the OS, can i put the 2 IDE desktars on RAID? will this setup work?

[Diggrr]

I don't see why not, you can choose your boot device in the bios on Abit boards. The raid doesn't have to be first.
On my Abit (KT7A-R) the cd's are found first, then the raid is found after the controller bios starts up.

[zulch]

You can do that, it will give you a RAID with a capacity of about 240. I'm sure it mentioned this in one of the referenced articles, but it might actually be slower if you use small files. The high benchmark speeds from Sandra are attributed to the fact that they use a very large file size - I think it's about 350MB on my version. If you are using large files, you can approach 100MBps transfer rates when using a RAID of 4 drives. Using the two you mentioned will give you around 35MBps.