any advantage of 2 SATA drives in Raid 0 over IDE?

batteryboy

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Hi

I have got 2 new Maxtor SATA 2 320gi drives for my PC. It's a high spec system, Intel 930 D, 2 gig ram, so, should I just use the 2 drives in SATA 2 IDE raher than in Raid 0 ??

Dave.
 

batteryboy

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Hi , Thanks for your reply,

Do you need a raid 0 configuration? Well, I probably don't need it but I thought it would be better, and I also used Raid 0 with my last system(the one I am having to use now!) but with PATA drives. It's only a hobby PC now so I use it for e-mail, personal documents, various spreasheets, some games, some video such as DVD and MPEG.

Ok i'll make it twice as bad and add another question.

Is it worth your time and effort to set up the raid? I must admit, I didn't think it took much time to set up?

I would say it's not that important of a feature for you.

My overall fear is that it would appear that if I use Raid 0 rather than 1 or 10, if there is a problem, apart from the possible los of any dat I've not backed up, the drives are not so flexible as I can't move one to another PC as a slave to get info off, or to run diagnostics or utilities on it, Do you agree?
 

cafuddled

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Mar 13, 2006
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When using raid you need to have a reason for using it or you are simply increasing the likelihood you will get problems with out actually gaining anything from it. Raid is good for people who need fast access for music or people who play games. I have noticed games installed on my raid set of HDDs will actually load nearly twice as fast as they would on my C Drive.

But one thing I did notice, and the reason why I use a standard IDE HDD for running Windows on. Is that it does manage get data corrupted from time to time as I would have a problem with windows nearly every month or so that would make me either need to reinstall Windows or replace some files that had simply just disappeared or become damaged.

So if these are your only HDDs I would highly recommend that you leave them on there own since what good is windows booting up in only one go of the little blue bar when you need to reinstall windows ever month.

Besides a disc-to-disc transfer is much faster than a partition-to-partition transfer so leaving them on their own does have its benefits.
 

rbarone69

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When using raid you need to have a reason for using it or you are simply increasing the likelihood you will get problems with out actually gaining anything from it. Raid is good for people who need fast access for music or people who play games. I have noticed games installed on my raid set of HDDs will actually load nearly twice as fast as they would on my C Drive.

But one thing I did notice, and the reason why I use a standard IDE HDD for running Windows on. Is that it does manage get data corrupted from time to time as I would have a problem with windows nearly every month or so that would make me either need to reinstall Windows or replace some files that had simply just disappeared or become damaged.

So if these are your only HDDs I would highly recommend that you leave them on there own since what good is windows booting up in only one go of the little blue bar when you need to reinstall windows ever month.

Besides a disc-to-disc transfer is much faster than a partition-to-partition transfer so leaving them on their own does have its benefits.

I agree 100%. If you are a casual user that just needs extra space, do not use RAID 0 (double the changes of complete corruption). If you are a gamer who plays games frequently or uses other very intensive applications that use allot of disk (photoshop on 5gig graphic images, etc) I would stay away.

Personally I use RAID 0 on a pair of raptors, but then again I am a gamer. I use my home computer for gaming, and some work, but I can afford to loose everything on this system without much pain.

They call it RAID 0 because Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks is an oxymoron when used w/out redundancy. Hence RAID 0 (not really RAID).

It really should be called AID or NRAID but that doesnt exactly have a good ring.

lol enough of my rant.
 

batteryboy

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Hi There,

Thanks for your reply. I'm going to set up my 2 new Maxtor SAT2 320 gig drives as Non-Raid this time. I'm gonna split each drive into 2 as I normally do to help me sort my stuff out and then I will set up a regular backup between the two drives and also a NAT drive!!

This will give me chance to assess the speed of these drives out of Raid and also have goos backups! Once I get the one of the 2 MAxtor 300 gigs drives replaced I can alway set up a raid with those!!