2 nonserial HDs in Raid vs 1 serial

[bulldawg1979]

I need to put the best system together without reaching the $1,000 ceiling. I picked up two 160G Western Digital Caviar HDs for $30 each and thought I could put them in a Raid 0 array to boost speed and offset the fact that they are not serial drives. My other option, to stay in budget, is to get one 120G WD Serial HD. Will performance differ much between the 2 setups?

If I didn't put the 160G drives in a raid array, so I could use one drive for the operating system and the other for storage and the paging file (and to protect loss of all data if one drive goes bad), how would they perform against the serial drive?

Appreciate all comments!

 

[CalvinHobbes]

If you have two identical drives, one serial and one PATA you won't notice any difference in performance.

 

[6000SUX]

Since you already have the two drives, I'd use them. That's a great amount of storage for the price, and I'm sure that your sub-1k system will stand you in good stead for a while.

 

[bulldawg1979]

If I stick with the two nonserial drives, would you put them in a Raid array?

 

[imported_Phil]

Originally posted by: bulldawg1979
If I stick with the two nonserial drives, would you put them in a Raid array?

No. Lose one drive, lose everything, with striping.

Mirroring is a far better bet if you really care about the data on the drives, and can't afford to lose it. However, read/write performance is the same unless you have a controller card that supports RAID-1 read striping (hint: most don't).