athalus

Distinguished
Mar 23, 2001
266
0
18,780
i got a question about raid. i'm looking at building a pc for a friend. the mobo i'm pretty much set on is the abit kx7-333. people on this site seem to like it. i checked newegg and the raid version is ony $13 more. my question is i plan on having 3 ide devices (cdr, dvd and hd) and i thought i read that w/raid you can set-up all 3 (or 4) devices as masters and thus having them run faster. is this true or not?
 
You can set up your hardrive on the raid controller, even without using the raid feature, and the dvd and cd-rw on the regular ide controllers. Some software will give you a warning on using a cd and cd-rw together on the same ide port when making copies, but you can still do it, just a little slower. The mobo will look for raid devices each time you boot, so your boot time is about 10-15 seconds longer.
 

Ross_co

Distinguished
Aug 3, 2002
11
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18,510
yep... 15 secs extra time too load but hey how about 30% more performance once in the o/s itself.... access timing is better so its worth a try... just remember if you want performance its a raid 0 (stripe) but if its security you want at the cost of performance then raid 1 (mirroring) is what you need to do.... mind and have identical hard drives not just the make but actual platter numbers and hard drive space... also you can use more than 2 drives as a raid array... for example if you use 3-4 hard drives is raid 0 array then there more than a 30% increase in performance.... more like 40-45%.... also check out radi 5 and 10 if you have a board that can handle it....