Raid help

Hi i need some help with raiding or sata
i have ASUS Motherboard for Intel Pentium 4 / Celeron Processors, 800Mhz FSB Model# P4P800 Deluxe Retail
more specs at http://secure.newegg.com/app/specification.asp?item=13-131-450
Iam total newbie to raid and sata
Now i have 2 80 gig western digital 8mb hd. Can i put both Sata and Raid on them?If so how?
What does Raid 0, and Raid 1 mean and whats the differences between them? Does my motherboard have raid 1 and 0?
How many hd can connect using sata and raid?

Does it have to be the same type of and size of hardrive to raid or sata?
thx dave

well, i've never done raid myself, but this is what i know

SATA is just the way data is transferred, so instead of ATA its Serial ATA. So instead of having those 40pin cables, you have a smaller cable which transfers serial data.

raid works best if you have hard drives that are similar. If you happen to have two hard drives which are 40gb and 80gb, then if you run raid, you'll end up only having 80 total with both. when setting up raid, every harddrive can only use the capacity the smallest one has.

raid 0 is called striping, all it does is just split the data across evenly upon the two hard drives, allowing it to be accessed faster and have faster speeds. but if one hard drive fails, you lose all your infomation.

here's a good thread on it: http://forum.oc-forums.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=241869

but if all you need is raid 0 and 1:

shiyan said:

in raid 1 (mirroring), if you use 2 disks of equal size, say 120GB each, you'll only see 120GB of available space under windows. This is half of the total capacity of the 2 drives.

in raid 0 (striping), you can use 2 disks or more. You nearly double your transfer rate with 2 disks, and increase it even more with more disks, but the gains diminish the more disks you add. You still keep the total capacity of the drives, so 2x 120GB in striping is 240GB. but, if one drive fails, you loose ALL the data.

Click to expand...

shiyan said:

hmmm... sorry to say this, but it looks like mirroring is a lot slower than striping, and does not seem much faster than 1 single drive...

here's a detailed report on RAID performance:
http://www.tech-report.com/reviews/2002q4/ideraid/index.x?pg=10

Click to expand...

in short, the performance of mirroring is roughly the same as 1 single disk.

striping seriously increases sustained transfer rate, but has slightly slower seek times.

Hey its me again. Now which one is faster...sata or raid?

I want to have 2 Hardrives. 1 for the operating system and 1 for gaming and stuff. How do i do this with raid and sata WITHOUT combining the 2 hardrives? Both have 7200 rpm, the os drive is 20 gigs, and the gaming drive is 80. I want to have the FASTEST possible setup ever. My mobo supports raid1,raid0,sata,and 0+1 and ide,
thx dave

SATA is just the way data is transfered. Its called Serial ATA because it serializes the data before being sent. Therefore it needs fewer wires than a normal 40pin ATA wire.

Raid is like a add-on, with Raid you can combine multiple harddrives to make one big one. So if you happen to have several 9gb hd's its alot easier to manage them if they're all combined. The only way to combine them is using RAID.

There are different raid setups which have different performance levels.

If you are planning to setup RAID, you should have hard-drives which are same size and similar specs.

So are both drives 80gb? or is one 20gb and the other 80gb

If you have two drives which are a 20gb and a 80gb, you would not want to use raid, because you'd lose 60gb. If you have 2 80gb drives, you can set up RAID on them and setup partitions so its 20gb/140gb

If I were you, I'd put both the SATA drives in and let XP take care of the striping. It's way easier to set up and you don't need a raid controller to do it.

but isn't it slower to do it by software? he already has the controller i think...

I have the controller onboard for raid setups.
.i still dont get it. Is there any perfomance gains with raid? if not then why do people use it? Is there any other reason either than combining hds?
Iam going to put 2 20 gigs on raid for os and 2 80 gigs for games

To make it faster should i raid the 20 gigs or leave them on sata or put a diff setup etc?

shiyan said:

in short, the performance of mirroring is roughly the same as 1 single disk.

striping seriously increases sustained transfer rate, but has slightly slower seek times.

Click to expand...

so yes, there is performance increase with raid 0, for a loss security wise.