raid, or storage on Nforce2?

JUst thought i would get some feedback on this. its a on my mind. I was thinking of getting a pair of seagate 160 gb sata drives, but instead, im thinking of just getting one 200 gb and sitting on it for a while. If i were to use my onboard raid controller, would there be a real benefit to system performence? or does the mcp-t's ide controller do a sufficiant job already? also, if i still wanted to go sata, is it possible to use an sata controller as a normal ide controller? there is the optionin my bios to change sata raid to sata. that would be really nice if possible, otherwise.. feh.

im not really looking for more frames or anything. i just want my system to be more responsive. its pretty much as fast as its going to go with the best parts possible for what it is. the drives im looking at getting support ncq which will be goodf or my next buy next year. i gotta say though, im damn tempted. the nsi k8n neo 2 has my attention as well as a new athlon64 3200+ 939. with my ram and video card as it is now, i thinkt hat would definatly pwn as a general use and gaming pc. ah well. ill probably wait for pci express anyway to get a new box.

so? raid 0? or just 200 gigs and somthing else? I have a bunch of money i want to burn he he. considering jumping the corsair ship and going ocz. or, getting a mobile barton, redoing my sleeving job, getting some speakers that dont suck XD.

The difference between sata raid and sata isn't major so just leave it on raid. You can use one/two seperate drives as sata raid without actually constructing a raid.

I suggest sitting on a 200 until you get pretty damn close to filling it. Then spring for another 200. What you could do is invest in a nice raid5 pci card and run two 100's and a 200. That way if you decide the redundancy isn't for you, you can have four hundred gigs of space.

If i was going to invest in a raid 5 card, i would just wait untill i could afford to drop like $600 on a scsi fiber controller. scsi drives themselves arent that expensive.
I think if i was going to do that, i might just wait for my nforce 4 and get a pci express raid controller. i can just imagine like 6 scsi drives in raid on that thing...

How would i configure my silicon image controller to use just a single drive in a non raid config? I guess the question i didnt really ask *but meant to* is if serial ata would be that much faster than the nforce 2 ultra ata controller. my system is pretty darned zippy with a single seagate 7200.7 rpm ata 100 drive. damn quite too.

I don't find there is any real boost in using sata compared to pata, if you are talking about comparing the same drive just different configurations. The only real performance boost I could see with sata is with using raptors, because the drive itself does offer a performance boost with 10,000 rpm's and 8mb cache. If high capacity storage is what you are after, pata is fine. In regards to raid vs. nonraid, it has been debated numerous times and what it comes down to is it depends on what you do with your computer. As such, I contend that raid0 has the potential for a performance boost, but not a guaranteed performance boost. I have noticed most people can achieve higher fsb when using ide compared to onboard raid controller. I am not sure if pci raid controller card would alleviate that situation. My guess is that it would, provided the motherboard has pci lock. I think Maxtor is making some kind of hard drive with 16mb cache now. I am not sure if it is ide or sata, but it seems like that might be something worth checking into since cache of any sort on any component yields more responsiveness. If a large amount of important data is to be stored, (not some worthless noodling of the conjugation of the verb be), then the redundancy of raid would ensure preservation of data and would in a sense be like a live backup.

what im looking to get really, is just a messload of cheap reliable storage, that just happens to be fast. i benched my drive as it is now and it read/write is anywhere from 6mb/s random read, 50 mb/s sequential read/write and 80 mb buffered read/write according to sandra. im sure there are better benchmarks and im sure my file system is anything but prime right now. my windows install is hella ghetto, just coppied over because to hell if was doing two full clean reformats in one week *long story behind this one that i really dont want to think about*

I collect a lot of fan subbed anime, play a lot of games and of course listen to music. I dont really care too much for my load times as they are, but if my system has to cache out, i get raped hard. fast cpu, fast ram => caching.... i need no less than 200 gb.

I am kind of thinking of just getting another PATA because they are compatible. i think i read somewhere that you cant use drives from one raid controller with another? so if my board dies, what do i do to recover my data? I think i have some reading to do before i even attempt this raid stuff. pata seems fast enough with a newer 8mb drive <_<.

If your raid 0 crashes or your board dies, there's no real way to get your data back. That's why I suggested another drive. You should be able to use the controller onboard to stripe the first two drives, them mirror the stripe to a third drive. That way if your raid crashes or you switch boards, you can ghost your mirror back to the stripe. (I'm not sure if this actually works on the 3114 as I haven't done this, no mass storage requiring redundancy. It should though.)

How would i configure my silicon image controller to use just a single drive in a non raid config?

Click to expand...

1) plug the drive in
2) boot the computer
2-1) if installing windows on the sata device, right when the screen turns blue, tap f6

think i read somewhere that you cant use drives from one raid controller with another

Click to expand...

When I transfered my raid array from my nf7 to my infinity, back to an nf7, and one more time to an infinity, it autodetected the raid array. Maybe it won't for you but it did for me? Then just do a repair install if necessary.

Screw those upgrades. Get a set of Kick *** speakers. You'll be dumping money in to a dead end platform.

Just wait till technology stabilizes a bit more with PCI-E and DDR2. Right Now AMD is going 3 directions just wait to see which is the better one.