80G harddrive and add nother 80g for RAID

[faye]

Hi,

want to know if i have a 80G of WD SATA harddrive for now, can i RAID (0) it with a different brand of 80G harddrive?

first of all, do i have to reinstall windows or format the first 80GB drive?

thanks

 

[LED]

Yes and yes...You can add a different HD but the RAID0 performance (theoretically) plus size will be based off of the slowest HD x2 so matching HD's are preferred and you will have to reformat/stripe both as 1 HD.

 

[faye]

oh, this is gonna be difficult for me or other people to add another drive to raid.

 

[Zelmo3]

You only have to reinstall if you're doing RAID0 (striped array). If you do a mirror array, every RAID device I've seen builds the mirror on the fly after you add the second drive and designate it as part of the array.

 

[faye]

Originally posted by: Zelmo3
You only have to reinstall if you're doing RAID0 (striped array). If you do a mirror array, every RAID device I've seen builds the mirror on the fly after you add the second drive and designate it as part of the array.

but too bad i am doing stripped array RAID 0, hmm... so how fast does it compare to SATA and RAID 0. 80gb for sata and 160gb for raid 0

i just want to get an idea of how fast so i can decide if i should get a raid 0 setup

 

[LED]

faye... here's a few Benchmark Examples on an AMD set-up which uses the PCI Bus for the SATA RAID

SE 120Gig WD's in RAID0

ATTO Bench's-WD 120 in RAID0

WD Raptor Single Drive

WD Raptos in RAID0

HD Tech Raptors in RAID0

 

[faye]

hmm, after reading THOSE numbers,.. I am confused..

can i ask some questions here?

If i want to copy a 500MB file from A drive to B drive (1 hd with 2 partition), how much longer will it take than a RAID 0 setup?
intel based.

 

[LED]

Yes it will be faster...how much will depend on the rest of your Box, Software and Drivers. You can safely figure appx 1/3 faster.