Raid or not to Raid

[Guest]

I have decided against the Creative MoBo completely. I am going to set my sights higher. I have just about decided on an AMD Thunderbird 1.2 or 1.3 CPU with the IWILL KK266 or 266-R with 256 megs of Atlas Precision SDRAM. My questions:
1. I need to keep my upgrade under $700, but I am going to need an ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon (I plan to do a lot of video editing)so I am already over budget and intend to keep my 27 gig ultra ATA66 hd, will it run fine on this system?

2.I don't ever plan to run more than 2 hd on this system, so do I need a RAID MoBo setup?

Thanks for any help you can give.



Titus 2:13

 

[jclw]

Well it all depends...

2 HDs and 1 CD means you only have room for one more device. Add a DVD, CD-RW, ZIP, or another HD and that will be it.

Then again you can get add on IDE controllers that just drop into a PCI slot at a later date. I use a HighPoint 370 ATA100 Raid controller (on a card) because my mb only supports ATA33, and I use the raid mirroring feature.

Also don't confuse the questions "Do I need 4 IDE controllers (8 devices)?" vrs "Do I need Raid?". Raid allows you to mirror and stripe drives in different ways to provide data protection and performance.

Unless you're using raid then I'd skip it for now, and if you need more IDE controllers at a later date you can just buy a card (regular or raid).

Yes your ATA66 drive will work fine.

- JW

 

[Guest]

> 2.I don't ever plan to run more than 2 hd on this system,
> so do I need a RAID MoBo setup?

You can have a RAID configuration even with two drives, should you wish so. RAID 0 (striping) increases your sustained data transfer by two times (though not the access time). RAID 1 (mirroring) allows you to automatically maintain an exact mirror of a drive as a backup.

Leo