Simple question about RAID 0

[MadHatter]

I understand that RAID 0 (data stripping) two hard-drives speeds up read/write operations and such. I'm wondering though... can you data-strip more than two hard-drives together? i.e. can you have 4 hard-drives as one partition/data stripping. Essentially quadrupuling performance?

Mad Hatter

 

[Guest]

simple answer, yes. I belive that the IDE cards support up to 4 drives, and the scsi cards support much more (7-15 per channel)

rs

 

[Guest]

If my A7V doesn't support RAID 0, can I buy a PCI RAID 0 card and will it be the same fast as it would just be a part of the motherboard?
Thank you

 

[Guest]

it depends on what kind of raid controller is on board and what pci raid controller you buy (ata66 vs. ata100). the speed is determined by how many drives you have in your array. if you have two drives in you array that transfer data at 30MB/s (the total would be 60MB/s) and the performance would be the same on the two cards. however if you added a third drive (so the total transfer rate should be 90MB/s) the ata66 raid card is a bottleneck because it will only transfer 66MB/s, while the ata100 raid cotroller will do the full 90MB/s. if you add another drive however the ata100 card will be a bottleneck.