Asus A7V266E RAID or not to RAID...

[KevinGuy]

Ok here is my question... I have 2 HD's and 2 CDROM's. One HD is a 30GB(ATA 100), this is set as my Primary - Master. A good ol' ATAPI cdrom which is the Primary - Slave and then I have a 10gig(ATA100) HD which is set as Secondary - Master and then my other CDRW is set as Secondary - Slave. These are all on the IDE Channels, I have none of them set up on the RAID channels. Is there anyway I could set this up with RAID to get better performace? Maybe everything on a seperat channel or maybe something else?

Also if I were to upgrade my computer and say get a 40gig HD could I put them on the RAID channels so they act as one drive? Or do they have to be the same size to do that. I never really did understand RAID that well.

--Kevin

 

[Guest]

To use both drives in RAID0 (striping for performance) the array would be limited to the size of the smallest drive in the array... in this case 10GB. To get the best performance you should use identical drives from the same manufacturer.
It would help to keep all your drives on separate channels all jumpered as masters. You might consider putting your optical drives on the two onboard IDE channels and creating two single-drive arrays on your two RAID channels.
If you are serious about RAID you should get a mobo with a RAID controller by Highpoint Technologies such as one of Abit's many RAID boards. The Promise Technologies Fastrak Lite on the Asus board won't support more than two drives per array and all Promise Raid controllers have issues with IBM drives. I have 76.8 GB and 46.1GB Deskstar 75GPX drives that worked for months and then failed in my Fasttrak100, wouldn't format even after wiping the reserve sector reconfiguring the array and repatitioning. Popped them in my Highpoint370 and after a painfully slow partitioning and formatting in which it stopped several times to "recover allocation units" both drives have been working fine ever since. Makes you wonder how many "Deathstars" were perfectly good drives that got a bad rap from Promise RAID.