Adding storage dilemma. Need advice.. suggestions..

[aceO07]

I have a Plextor 12x10x32, a Toshiba 12x dvd, a 13.5gig HD, a 30gig HD. Both of my IDE channels are used up and I'm running low on space.

What should/can I do? Buy a 40gig(or 60gig) HD and get rid of the 13.5gig... or get another IDE controller and keep all the drives? Any potential problems?

 

[mike123]

What about the abit raid board?Connect all your devices to a seperate controller.

 

[DJFuji]

see if maxtor still has that deal where you get a free udma100 controller with purchase of a HDD. Then do it like me and try to get each device it's own IDE Channel to maximize data throughput

 

[tslaughrey]

Depending on how much money you have, you could also get a RAID controller and another 30GB drive identical to the one you have and stripe them together for one 60GB drive. Then you could put each of your optical drives on one IDE channel, and you'd get a nice speed boost for your hard drive(s). Just another option to think about.

 

[joecool]

are you really using 43 gb of data on a regular basis? if not, save yourself some money & get organized - delete all the junk, archive old stuff off to cd's, and get a bunch of extra space for nothing!

also, consider zipping up stuff you only use occasionally.

good luck!

joe

 

[aceO07]

The raid controller idea seems pretty interesting. That would allow me up to 4 more drives... Are there any issues with adding another controller card? Bootup issues? OS issues? Does the system know which controller to use first? Compatible with Linux? etc.. etc.. ? I have no experience with raid Wow! The Promise Supertrak100 is expensive! $300+ Maybe, I'll go for the Fasttrak100 TX4 (cheaper, $125). The idea of 4 independent channels is nice. Anybody know if it is possible to use this raid controller as a normal IDE controller (without using raid)?

 

[aceO07]

Joe, you make a good point. I only have a few apps and no games (except mame32). That at most takes up 5gigs and another 2gigs for dual boot. Most of the space is taken up by MP3s, anime, and music videos. I can backup the anime and music videos, if they're organized in some way. It's hard to backup my MP3 collection since it's so nice to have that easily accessible.

It's certainly worth looking into backing-up or cleaning up. I can't always be a spendthrift..

I'll give it some thought. There's still finals and christmas shopping to do, so it'll be a while before I have a chance to act on this.

 

[tslaughrey]

Basically, the RAID controller has its own BIOS and setup program. You use the setup program to configure your hard drives and that's about it. Installing the RAID controller itself shouldn't be a problem. It comes with drivers like any other controller card you put in.

Once you have your drives set up, you have to tell the BIOS to boot from the RAID controller. It varies depending on the BIOS, but you just make sure that the first boot device is your RAID controller. For example, on my current system my first boot device is set to SCSI, since RAID controllers are seen as SCSI devices. Once you do that then you can install Windows like you would to any other hard drive.

You can use a RAID controller as a normal IDE controller if you want without doing RAID. I think they call that JBOD ... just a bunch of drives.

I don't know if Linux supports RAID or not. I suppose it would depend on whether the controller manufacturer provides Linux drivers, since the drive setup and boot priority are done in BIOS.

I had never set up RAID before I got my Promise FastTrak, but I didn't have any problems. I didn't explain it too well here, but it's not that difficult to set up.