Should I set up RAID?

[Krusty]

I ordered one of those western digital special edition 120GB hard drives from dell a while back and I think it just got delivered to my parents house this week. The drive is supposed to be for my dad since he can use some more storage space for his photography stuff.

Now: He has a 60Gig 7200 rpm drive in his Dell Dimension 4200. I have a 60 gig 7200 rpm drive in my rig right now. Either my dad is gonna take my drive and I'll take the new one or vice versa. So do I go for a 120Gig special edition drive or attempt to make a RAID 0 array with 2 drives that are likely not the same brand?

Next question: I do not have on board RAID in my computer. I have noticed that RAID IDE controllers sell for like $15 on pricewatch. Do these really support RAID 0, should I go for the pci IDE RAID controller, which one should I buy, and how cheap can I get it? (I'm poor) Ok, so that was really 4 questions, but they were all in the same catergory at least.

 

[BaldHeadedDork]

I don't often say this, but I don't think you should bother. RAID is great to play around with, and if your motherboard had a built-in RAID chipset I'd say go ahead and give it a shot. The chances are slim to none that you would gain a performance advantage you could see with your eyes. But if its there you might as well play with it, right?

Since you'll have to buy a PCI RAID card, however, that goes out the window. Even if you can find a good, working card for ten or fifteen bucks on Pricewatch, that's a cheese pizza and a six pack of cheap beer. To get a good, well known card, you'll probably have to spend a lot more.

The best IDE RAID cards come from Promise, Adaptec and High Point. All will support RAID 0, 1 and 0+1. Expect to pay about $40 for a two-channel PCI card that supports ATA100. (Promise made IDE RAID cards back in the day of ATA66, make sure that's not what you're getting on those ten dollar sites.)

You might want to take the second sixty and consider a RAID-equipped motherboard at our next upgrade. But I'd skip buying a card now.


BHD

 

[cypher]

you could always use software raid on Win 2K or XP.

 

[plizzo]

i think you'll get better performancefrom a wd with an 8 mb buffer than from 2 hdds with a 2 mb buffer in raid 0. i dont have any benchmarks to verify it, but thats my guess.

 

[Krusty]

you could always use software raid on Win 2K or XP.

Software RAID? never heard of it. Please explain and inform me of the major flaws.