1 SATA II hard drive or SATA I RAID 0?

[BeatBlaster]

Hello everybody!

Here's the situation. I have 1 SATA II 80GB (3 GB/s) hard drive and 1 SATA I 80GB (1.5 GB/s)hard drive. I'm getting ready to install Windows Vista Home Premium and was wondering...

Would I be better off installing Vista on the 1 SATA II hard drive by itself or should I create a RAID 0 array between the two drives?

So what do you think? I primary use my system to watch Divx/XviD backups, edit and mix MP3s and WAV files, backup DVDs to ISOs and surf the Internet. Thanks for your input. It's VERY appreciated!

---Daniel

 

[disgust]

if you don't care about the increase chance of total disk failure, go for it, it'll be faster

 

[BeatBlaster]

Nice. I'm totally aware of the increased chance of disk failure. Thanks to living and learning, I back up all of my important stuff to DVDs

Thank you very much for your reply. If anyone else has anything to add to this, by all means, please do!

---Daniel

 

[etomasula]

Yup I second that. The SATA 150 Interface bandwidth is hard to completely use with 2 drives, you will definately see a performance gain with the RAID 0 Setup.

On another point of view. . .

With the RAID 0 setup you have a chance of losing all your data, moving the page file over to the second drive (seperating windows and Pagefile) will also give you a performance increase (not as much as RAID 0). Also this will give you 2 drives so you can do disk to disk backups and save yourself some DVDs. . .

 

[BeatBlaster]

Thank you for your input too etomasula. I can't wait until my copy of Vista shows up. :lol: Have a great day people!

 

[disgust]

you could do manual load balancing beyond just the swap file, really. keep any disk io intensive tasks on the second disk and away from the OS and the OS'll be faster.

or for example when video editing is about disk speed and not cpu speed, the output could be on the secondary disk while the input file is on the main one, etc.

 

[BeatBlaster]

Very good practices to note indeed. I also have a 200gb SATA drive that I use for storage already. I also keep the swap file there too. You can never be too careful with your precious data