Raid??

[Guest]

Could someone briefly explain or point me to a website that explains the basic of raid? I am building a new system mostly for gaming and I don't know if I need or want it.

Thanks

 

[bum_jcrules]

<A HREF="http://www.raid.com/04_01_00.html" target="_new">http://www.raid.com/04_01_00.html</A>

Here is a site that can tell you all you might want to know about raid.

Are you big into data storage?

If no, then RAID probable is not for you. Just get a really fast HDD. SCSI interface is the fastest MB/sec or get ATA 100 or faster IDE. Depends on what you want to spend. SCSI is more expensive of course.

Mobo with SCSI is more expensive as well compaired to IDE boards.

So what do you want to do with your machine?

If only a gaming machine, speed, perfomance, speed, and maybe some perfomance, and a little speed might help; but RAID might not. - hehehe Fast CPU, Fast Memory, Fast FSB, Fast GPU, Big monitor, Lots of fans, and Fast HDD.

If you are looking for data integrity and you want multiple HDD's then RAID is your product. (Multiple HDD's not one partitioned)

<b>Your mother puts license plates in your underwear. How do you sit? - Real Genius</b> :lol:

 

[FatBurger]

get ATA 100 or faster IDE

7200RPM ATA66 will own 5400RPM ATA100.

<font color=orange>Quarter <font color=blue>Pounder</font color=blue> <font color=orange>Inside</font color=orange>

 

[bum_jcrules]

ATA 133?

How about a 10000RPM ATA 100?

<b>Your mother puts license plates in your underwear. How do you sit? - Real Genius</b> :lol:

 

[bum_jcrules]

Out of respect for FB...and all of the other here. (Who, FB that is, helps to keep me specific & I respect that.)

Get a transport technolgy. SCSI 120 160...whatever you can afford that is the highest number. ATA 100 133 if you can find a board to support it and a HDD to boot.

That was step one.

Step two is to find a HDD that has that high transport and a low seek time and high RPMs.

This combination of transport tech and seek time will inhance your overall HDD experiance.

<b>Your mother puts license plates in your underwear. How do you sit? - Real Genius</b> :lol:

 

[FatBurger]

Others may (and will) disagree and I may (and probably will) be wrong, but here are the most important factors in hard drive speed (in order of most to least important):

1. Rotation speed. 15,000 vs. 4500.
2. Interface.

That's it. What? No seek time? Seek time is determined mostly by rotation speed, and I've seen up to 5 different seek times listed for a single drive. On the same website. I ignore that for IDE drives. For SCSI drives I just average them out.

<font color=orange>Quarter <font color=blue>Pounder</font color=blue> <font color=orange>Inside</font color=orange>

 

[Lars_Coleman]

I would have to agree with Fatburger on this one.

<font color=red>BIOS updates do wonders ....</font color=red>

 

[lhgpoobaa]

Ditto...
all seek times are rotation speed dependent.
trak to trak seek
full seek
random seek
elvis seek

faster spinning = lower seek times.

data density.. small effect on max sustainable transfer rates, but still 7200rpm is better than 5400.

i would prefer 7200rpm over 5400rpm any day.
ata66,100? wouldnt make too much difference really.
onboard cache? most have 2mb, wester digital has a new select range out with 8mb... hope that becomes the norm


Is that a Northwoody in your pocket or are you just eXPited to see me?

 

[ObiWan_Kenobi]

can you use onboard raid controllers as Plain ATA100 IDE controllers?

People need to start rapidly understanding that the world *REALLY* does revolve around *ME*.

 

[camieabz]

Yes!

You still need to install your RAID controller drivers to allow thw ATA100 function, otherwise the drives will run slow. Just don't create a RAID array in the BIOS.

<b><font color=blue>~scribble~</font color=blue></b>

 

[FatBurger]

Actually, you need to install the drivers so that Windows will recognize the drive at all. I almost forgot about that this weekend

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[HarleyMYK]

I used Promise onboard RAID 0 with two IBM 40GB 60GXP's. These are very fast without RAID. With RAID 0 the Sandra disk benchmarks were up about 50% (theoretically it might have gone up 100%).

Old enough to remember when sex was safe and a personal computer was a slide rule