Question for Raid Gurus

[Cooj]

Here is a Question:

If I wish to run 2 WD800JB's in RAID but I wish to run my OS on a seperate drive. That IS possible correct?

If it is... And if I were to get a mobo that supported RAID, do the 2 hd's have to be plugged seperately? or can they be Master and Slave on the same IDE Connection? I believe that plugging them on different channels (1&2) would only make the RAID even faster correct?

I was thinking I could run a sepreate HD on IDE1 and the run 2 WD800JB's on IDE2 as Master and Salve using RAID

Is this possible? Or do I need a controller card to do this properly?

Cooj

 

[ejsmith2]

You have several different wayz to run this one.

Nt 5.0+ will let you run a software raid0. The config won't matter; either or, neither nor. Hook up the drives, flip them to 'dynamic', and select which ones you want raided.

If you buy a mainboard with an onboard controller, and want to use a hardware raid, you can do that. Some of them (like my asus a7v133a) have a castrated controller setup, which limits the way you can setup your raid. There's no way to 'manually' configure it, aside from hooking up the drives you want to raid, configure it, shutdown, then hook up the other drive that you *don't* want raided. I have this problem; hence, I use a software raid under XP.

You can buy the full out PCI controller card. The bios on those are fully functional, so if you get the card, there will be no *good* reason to use a software raid. They let you manually flip on raid for any drives hooked up: 2, 3, or 4 drives. Some even have 4 seperate channels (you pay quite a bit extra), so you could hook up 8 different devices at the same time. Which would actually be pointless using IDE, unless you're using 5-year-old maxtor drives with max read speeds of 12meg/sec. I have two of those nappy little 12meg/sec drives raided.

And yes, having your raid drives on seperate channels will speed them up. Not an extraordinary amount, but it makes it much more efficient as it can access both drives at the exact same time without having to stop one device to access the other. You'd see the largest difference when you try to burn a whole bunch of little files to a cdr.