ATA/133 Vs. SATA

[Refractoryman]

Will I notice any significant performance decrease between the Maxtor Maxline III ATA133 250gb hd model #7L250R0 and a Maxtor Maxline SATA 250gb hd model #7l250R0? After scouring all the forums all day yesterday for information. I bit the bullet and ordered (3) of the Maxtor Maxline III ATA133 250gb hd model #7L250R0 from new egg. Since I have my rig's software in place I did not want to perform a re-install of everything. Since I work from my house doing AUTOCAD and Digital imaging Photography I could not afford the down time and uncertainties that might come with a SATA upgrade. I am know also thinking of running raid with two of these drives. What would be the best raid configuration to run for performance and back-up? If anything the new drives should be a boost over what I am currently running below.

my rig;
ASUS A8V Deluxe mob
2gb memory
Antec 430 power supply
Athlon 64 +4200 cpu
dell 2405FPW monitor
Drive #1 - Maxtor 6Y080L0 (80 GB)
Drive #2 - Maxtor 52049U4 (20 GB)
Drive #3 - WDC WD12 00BB-00FTA0 (112 GB)

 

[stevty2889]

Hard drives can't really even fully utilize ATA100, let alone 133 or SATA, so you won't be losing any performance by going with the PATA drives over the SATA drives. Raid-5 would probably be the best setup, but I've only used raid-0 and raid-1 so somebody with a little more experience would be more help with that.

 

[TSS]

currently the performance should still be minimal simply because the HDD is too slow to kill all the bandwidth in a ata/133 connection. though it should be close.... basicly the reason why there isnt anything bigger then 300 gb on PATA AFAIK.

if you want to run raid, theres a few options:
RAID 0 - striping, best performance as it takes 2 HDDs and turns them into 1 HDD. though, you have more risk of faillure since if 1 disk chrashes, ALL data is lost. requires 2 or more disks.
RAID 1 - mirroring, best backup option since it'll see just 1 drive of the original size (so with 2 drives of 250 GB youll only have 250GB available) but it'll copy everything exactly onto the 2nd drive. so if one fails, you will still have everything on the other. requires 2 or more disks.
RAID 0+1 - striping and mirroring. basicly creates 2 RAID 0 arrays, and makes the 2nd a copy of the first. requires 4 or more disks.
RAID 5 - pararity (dont know if thats spelled right.) basicly, you have 3 disks of equal size, and it'll take 1/3rd of each disk for pararity info. if 1 disk from the array is lost, the other 2 disks will be able to recreate all data on that disk. its the best protection, with a little more speed though not as good as RAID 0. requires 3 or more disks.

so it depends on your own needs. if you want optimum backup for a low price, go with raid 1. if you want optimal performance, go raid 0. want a bit of both, go raid 5. got too much money, go raid 0+1. the catch with raid though is that you need a number of drives per RAID, all the same size. if your running like raid 0, with 1 drive of 200GB and 1 of 250GB, you'll end up with 400 GB in size. it'll take the smallest drive, so if you'd RAID those drives of yours in say, RAID 0, you'll have 60 GB available since the smallest is 20GB.

 

[Refractoryman]

I could go RAID 0 with (2) of the drives and use the third for backup. I also have a external USB 300gb seagate that I back-up. Does that sound like a safe configuration and would it give me a performance increase? Also when the HD disk are installed. Do they get connected as MAster and Slave or connected to their own seperate controller? I assume I would connect everything to the promise controller? I'm a "NEWBIE" when it comes to setting up and installing raid. But will be a learning experience. Thanks

 

[Refractoryman]

After researching and reading some articles I am not going to do raid. Just a Master, Slave "Back-Up" and a back-up. This may seem redundant to some. But I have experiened once booting up in the morning and frying my psu and "C" drive. Luckily I had a second drive at the time with all my data. Since then I Use one drive for the OS & Apps and the other (3) for back-up and mirror image copies done weekly of the main drive. It's a bad feeling when the un-thinkable happens and everything is gone. My mirrored images from Drive Image 7.0 have saved me several times. Either from a virus or a configuration issue.