Hard Drives

[artform]

What's the best & fastest desktop drives available for a 4 drive raid system. I have a sata,pcie gateway system LX-6810-01

 

[Rusting In Peace]

What capacity and raid type?

 

[artform]

What capacity and raid type?

1terabite each drive raid 1+0

 

[Rusting In Peace]

Well with that Gateway it looks like you'll need some 5.25 to 3.5 bay adapters as there seems to only be 4 x 3.5 drive bays. Presumably you are using one already for your OS disk.

What's your motivation for using 1TB hard drives? You'd get better performance from using SSD drives or WD VelociRaptors.

Additionally if you are demanding performance you'd be better off using a hardware raid card rather than doing software raid with the LX-6810-01 motherboard.

 

[artform]

Thanks for the info. Money is main reason for 1tb drives.

 

[artform]

Did find out that my computer only supports raid 0 on the motherboard.
Also system bios is only upgradeable if running vista.
PCIE raid cards too expensive. $400.00

 

[artform]

Best answer selected by artform.

 

[thetrivialstuff]

Did find out that my computer only supports raid 0 on the motherboard.
Also system bios is only upgradeable if running vista.
PCIE raid cards too expensive. $400.00

What OS are you running? Linux does software RAID really well and can do all the types of RAID. I've found that the performance of the arrays is limited by the physical speeds of the drives, not the software, so the performance is good.

If you're running one of the "home" versions of Windows that doesn't have software RAID enabled, there's a hack you can do to enable it, but I don't recommend it because:

- Windows software RAID requires your disks to be formatted as "dynamic" disks, which aren't easily useable in any other OS (bad if your system ever won't boot for some reason).

- It's unreliable. If the drives are different types, sometimes one will randomly drop out of the array for reasons known only to Microsoft, and need to be re-synched, which is time-consuming.

~Felix.