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RAID and PSU Sleeving Questions

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Hey,

I got some extra cash for christmas, and was wanting to sleeve my powersupply, or save up a little more for another hard drive for RAID. Would I see a noticeable difference if I bought another hard drive for RAID? Also do the hard drives have to be like the same EXACT hard drive? I have a Western Digital SATA2 250GB 16 MB Cache "WD2500KS" hard drive that I bought about 3 months ago. I will buy another WD2500KS but I'm sure something will be a little different than this one. How hard is it to setup a RAID?

Or

Should I sleeve my PSU? It wouldn't be too expensive. Is it hard to do? I have a Tagan 480W "TG-480-U22" PSU.

I'm leaning more towards RAID, but I'm not sure if I would get the performance for the price, but hard drive are so cheap anyways now.

Any other ideas for under $125 upgrades or mods? My system specs:

AMD Athlon 64 3700+ San Diego w/ Thermalright XP-90C heatsink w/ AS5
DFI LanParty UT nF4 Ultra-D
ATI Radeon X850XT PE
1GB (2x512) Mushkin Redline XP4000 DDR500 RAM
Western Digital SATA2 16MB Cache 250GB HDD
Maxtor Diamondmax 9 160GB PATA HDD
Western Digital 120GB PATA HDD inside a Vantec Nexstar 3 enclosure
Tagan 480W "TG-480-U22" PSU
Emprex Dual Layer DVD Burner (this one is junky, has some problems so this might be worth upgrading)
Antec P160 w/ Side Window Case

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Hi

I would go for RAIDing, but instead buy two smaller drives and have the system + perhaps games on that array. Keep the WD for storage, important files etc.

There is quite a performance difference in RAID 0 compared to using single HDD. RAID 1 on the other hand is usually slower. For RAID 0 you need two identical HDDs. For RAID 1 they should be identical in size or if you´re adding one to a working system (as you are thinking of) then the new drive must be larger.

So on Newegg I found these drives:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E1682...
or, a little more expensive
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E1682...

I have two 80 GB Hitachis (almost as the above) in a RAID 0 array and two older ones for storage in my computer.

The thing with Hitachi drives is that you must use the Hitachi Feature Tool (downloadable from Hitachi support site) and set the drives to SATA 2 , 3Gb/s, as they´re delievered as SATA1 per default, not much of a problem) Do this before anything else and not when you´ve installed everything. :!:

Setting up the RAID on a bootable system means a complete Windows installation, using the F6 command to load RAID drivers from a diskette when prompted during installation setup. Of course, first you must enable the RAID-controller in BIOS, reboot the computer and invoke the "RAID-bios" on the mobo to create the RAID array, before you can install Windows. Not much of a problem if you check the manual and are careful what you choose, but you can always restart/reset if things go wrong.

Good luck

RAID on

Andy
 
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