RAID controller sits in ISA or PCI slot so all mobos should take them fine. but if you have a desktop system, you wont be really using the fastest SCSI hard drives and probabely having mission critical data that you could lay your life to protect. you could alway backup.
many boards today come with a simple IDE RAID controller some from Abit and MSI and Asus that implement just two basic types of RAID configuration.
RAID 0 is where you strip your data into two (or more) and store each part on either drive. you disk access speeds up to twice, since you are basically widening the channel for disk I/O. of course, if one disk conks off, you are lost but anyway it could happen with a single drive too.
RAID 1 mirrors all the data onto two (or more) drives so that whatever is on the first drive the second drive has it all. so if any one disk dies you have your data secure on the other. these RAID controllers also support the RAID 0+1 configuration that works with 4 drives and strips your data into two and makes two copies of it. so you get both speed as well as reliability, but will cost you four times as much.
btw this RAID appears as a single drive to the system, and using multiple disks does not contribute to the total storage capacity. just it speeds up your machine or protects your data. and these IDE RAID controller will support just the two+two drive configurations. andthat you need to have all your RAID disk of same capacity and speed else it will fall back to the lowest common factor or might have errors in its working.
if you dont have onboard RAID you can have IDE RAID cards from Promise Technologies.
girish
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