[chepocks]

Hello evry1!
My questions are about setting up Raid. Ive read some of the posts and browsed through the suggested sites but I've still got a few questions.

First these are what I plan to use:
-I just got a IWill side raid 100 card from my brother
-100GB Wester Digital 72k rpm
-20GB Maxtor 72k rpm

Okay now the Q's:
1. Is there other software I can use with this card so I can go beyond raid 1?

2. Can these two drives be raided? I was planning to make the 100gb the master with minimum of 3 partitions. 2nd part 20gb in size to be raided with the maxtor. Possible?

3. I was hoping for an equal mix of both speed AND reliability so what are my options here? Raid 0, 1 or 3?

I got more questions but just cant think right now.
Hope to hear from yous guys soon.

[DocClock aka MadClocker]

Ok here's the deal....in raid 0, the two hdd's are setup as one drive, and can only be the size and speed of your slowest smallest drive...e.g. if you plan on using a 20g 7200rpm drive and a say 120g 5400rpm drive, the they will effectively be a 40g5400 setup. Make sence? ok if you have a 20g and a 30g both 7200rpm, then in raid0 they would be like two 20's ,and the extra 10g would be wasted....But if you are running XP pro, the you could use the 20g for a boot partition, and create a dynamic disk with the rest of the space, and you could use all the space on the drives, but I dunno how effective it would be, or how good real world benchmarks would do....but what you could do, is find another maxtor 20g (probably cheap) and setup the two 20g's in raid0, and use the 100g for "mirroring"...but I'm not sure if you can get away with using one drive as a mirror drive.
Hope this clears up some of the mud for Ya
edit: I recently seen a 1.08 terabyte system on "the screensavers" on techtv....it took 7maxtor 160g drives to do it, but winxp reckognised the "dynamic" disk setup as one big 1tb hdd, and in the drive properties sheet, it showed 1.08 TB as the capacity of drive c:....they also made a prediction that within 5 or 10 yrs we will see terabyte hdds in oem computers.

[Xaotic]

The card will limit you to RAIDs 0, 1 and 0+1. The only option for getting other configurations will be a different controller and the more versatile controllers get very expensive.

The two drives can be RAIDed using the card, but as Doc says, you'll lose 80GB of space. Software RAID can be used with dynamic disks, but I've never quite trusted software RAIDs for critical data. The optimum solution would be an identical 20GB Maxtor, try to get the same model and firmware if possible. This way the drive mechanicals, firmware, and geometry will be the same and give you the best performance.

As far as speed and reliability go, it's more of a choice between the two. RAID 0 is fast, but without any redundancy for data protection, while RAID 1 is relatively slow, but has a great deal of protection.

[chepocks]

Thanks to you guys!
Yes, it certainly cleared up alot of the confusion for me.
The next step would be to go out a get me either a 20GB Maxtor or save up for a 100GB WD.
Then again, (although both the manual and Xacotic say Im limited to 1+0) would raid 3 be at all possible? Cause then I could pick up 2 extra 20GB Maxtor instead.

[chepocks]

Sorry about mispelling your name Xaotic. Kinda in a hurry.

[Xaotic]

NP. You'd need a different(read much more expensive) controller to do RAID3, if you can find one for IDE that does that level. The 3ware Escalade 7500 series is one of the better cards, but doesn't support that level. By the time you need that level, most people are running SCSI RAID and usually go with RAID 5. For 0+1, you'd need 3 more drives, since it's striped and mirrored.