to RAID or not to RAID

and to maybe help your decision on buying a motherboard with onboard RAID built in. I had never owned a mb that had raid builtin until i recieved a new MSI K7T266-RU Pro2. this board has onboard RAID. First time i'd ever even installed a RAID of ne kind. my computer is so much faster compared to before. the before machine's main drive was a 30 gig ibm 7200 with a 13gig wd 5400 as storage. I paired the 30 gig with another one just like it. first test with sandra reported a 68mb/s transfer rate. do the math but that's fast as hell. well just my two cents so good luck on the new mb.

After having a KT7A-R for almost a year, I finally rebuilt and added a stripped, RAID-0 setup last week. Just as you saw, I was amazed at the performance increase, in OS load, loading apps, just about anything the required HDD transfer. I'm sold. Plus, the newest Highpoint, onboard controllers have surpassed the Promise, add-on controllers recently. RAID me baby!!!

Onboard or off never mattered to me...I've got several systems with both and build all my systems around a RAID array ever since I tried it the first time.

Performance gain is too great and the cost really is negligible if you're considering large amounts of storage. 2 20GB drives really aren't much more than 1 40GB now and controllers can be had for as cheap as $30...less if it's onboard.

Only way to go as far as I'm concerned.

For a raid array 0, do you need 2 identical hardrives in terms of size, rpm, ATA/33/66/100/133?

You SHOULD have exact drives, but inexact ones will normally work, too. My bro used to use the mobo I have now (A7V133), and he ran one 30GB/5400rpm drive and one 20GB/7200rpm drive (both Maxtor), and ran them as a 'single' 40GB drive. 10GB one one of the drives was wasted, and the other had to have its transfer rates choked off (due to faster spin), but they worked, and it was faster than single drives.

The only complaint he had about the setup was he couldn't stand waiting the extra minute or so at startup for the RAID BIOS to initialize; it's quite slow on this board, and made any gain from having fast loading times at startup was lost. Games loaded fast though

Im new to the RAID,but I just bought a K7T 266 Pro 2 and it don't have RAID,are saying you need RAID to run 2 HD,I don't know and would like to know because I plan on adding another 60 GIG HD in the future.
Also am I to understand there is on board RAID and off board RAID?
And if it is necessary to run 2 drives I need to know what items to get ..Thanks

Welcome to the world of computers and overclocking.

As for your questions, You don't need raid to run 2 HDD's. You can run upto 4 HDD's on most mobo's w/o raid. Raid allows you to connect the drives in many combinations for speed and fault-tolerance.

Hope this helps, any more questions you have feel free to ask away.

RAID

I also have the MSI RAid MOBO. I set up two IBM drives on raid o as a stripped unit with total 117 gig's. It was terribly slow. I did have trouble installing the OS though. That may be the problem. I had I.T. Pro's tell me that the raid was slower than just a single HDD on the raid ide connection. That is what i found to be the issue. If there are any settings in BIOS I need to adjust let me know because I like the idea of RAID.
thanks