Is RAID worth it?

[Guest]

OK, my little K6-2@500MHz is showing signs of wear on the good ol' ASUS A7B babyAT board, and my upgrade is in the not-so-distant future. I'm not running any apps that would use dual-processing, and besides, Win98SE wouldn't use it anyway.

Well, a new ATX case is gonna be a must, as no one makes BabyAT boards anymore, but the case isn't the issue. My question is to RAID or not to RAID. My 8.4Gb WD drive is only 20% full, and it'll only run up to 66Mbps bus, as it isn't ATA-100 compatible. This old board will only get up to 33Mbps anyway. My largest application is 8.2Mb (Quicken for Home), which loads in a few seconds anyway.

Is RAID worth it for me, the typical home user? Any suggestions for single-CPU boards (from experience, please)would be appreciated.




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[jclw]

Raid is used mainly for data backup, it provides various methods to mirror your hard drive so you always have a current backup if your drive fails. Some Raid configurations also provide higher data xfer rates but for the average user it wouldn't make much difference.

If you have a lot of data that you backup it could be worth buying a raid m/b, but if not I would put the money into a CD-RW that you can use not only for backing up but creating cds as well.

In terms of ATA-100 and all that remember that the sustained data x-fer rate on the top rated IBM DeskstarGXP drives is only 37MB/s so having a 100MB/s interface won't speed things up that much. I see no real difference between my ATA-33 and ATA-100 interfaces in day to day life.

I have an Asus A7V (that took a week or two to iron out the bugs but it works fine now. I also have an Asus P3B-F (intel 440BX chipset) that has been super from day 1.

Just a thought: I noticed you mentioned single cpu boards, check out the prices of a dual cpu board - for example you could buy a dual board and a PIII-733 now and then 1 or 2 years down the road buy another PIII-733 (they should be really cheap then) and double your processing power without replacing anything else.

- JW