A8V with 2 non-RAID SATA HDs?

[TomWaits]

I'm looking at building a new system with an Asus A8V board. I want to go with two drives; one for the OS and programs and the other for data and temp files. I'd like to go with SATA 7200 RPM drives, but do multiple SATA drives dictate a RAID setup? Alternately, is it be possible to have the OS / program drive as a standard IDE and the second drive as a SATA with the option of adding another SATA drive later on for additional capacity?

I also thought about an external USB drive for the data, but I'm worried about the data transfer rate (40-50 MB raw wav files).

 

[ChipDeath]

All RAID controllers I'm aware are completely happy with 2 separate, non-raid drives.

A good performance option would be to have a single RAID 0 array, but split it into 2 partitions for your purposes. The downside to that is if one drive goes you'll lose everything. The upside is considerably better disk performance.

I have a similar setup at home, I have 2 80Gb Drives in RAID 0, split into a 30Gb partition which has the OS and some programs on it, and a 130Gb one which has Games, downloads, etc on it. I do actually have another single 80Gb drive which just has various programs and stuff on too.

If you're installing the OS onto a drive attached to a RAID controller (whether it's an array or not) you'll need a floppy drive for the installation, and a driver disk (which should come with the mobo)

Having one SATA and one IDE drive is also a viable option.

The External drive is not worth it unless you want to move the data from one computer to another, and a network is not an option (e.g. between home and the office). It's cheaper and better performing to stick with 'classic' internal disks otherwise.

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