Getting ready to upgrade my system. Should I RAID again?

[SemperFi]

My current system in my sig, has 2 80 Gig 2 Meg buffer drives setup in RAID 0.

My new board is sitting here beside me an Asus A7N8X deluxe. I just bought an 160 Gig 8 Meg buffer Maxtor from the hot deals forum and I am wondering if I should keep the raid setup or just use the 8 Meg buffer drive. Does anyone have any experience or can point me to some reviews comparing 2 Meg buffer drives in RAID 0 config and a 8 Meg buffer drive. I thought I read somewhere that there wasn't much difference between the two setups.

The A7N8X deluxe has onboard serial raid and the adapters cost $20 each. I figured I could find raid controller for less than $40 but I haven't found one yet. I bought a cheap one at one of those roving computer shows about a year ago for $30 and it is still going strong. The only complaint I have about that one is it doesn't have a connector for the hard drive LED. Too bad I am still using it in another computer.

Any input and suggestions would be appreciated.

 

[beatle]

Go for it, but put those 80 giggers in RAID 1. I didn't find RAID 0 to be of much use to me. Seek times are still the same, so overall performance didn't really improve, and I was working with large (800+ meg) files. I believe you'd find the 160 gig drive to be faster than the 2 80s.

 

[BoomAM]

Set the 2 80gbs up as striping drives, and use the 160gb as a mirror drive for them.
Thats what i`d do. Then you get speed and security.

 

[SemperFi]

Boom that is a great idea. I wonder if I can do that with the onboard controller of the A7N8X. Do you recommend a card that I can do this with?

Thanks

 

[BoomAM]

Originally posted by: SemperFi
Boom that is a great idea. I wonder if I can do that with the onboard controller of the A7N8X. Do you recommend a card that I can do this with?

Thanks

Im not entirely sure, but i would have thought that the on board raid controller on the A7N8X would be able to do that. Does it support Raid 10 (1+0)? Cos if it does, then i think that thats the raid that you need to do it. I think the A7N8X supports raid for both SATA and PATA, and mixed.
Do some research into raid types or something.
Cos im not entirely sure of everything about raid myself.
If/When you do it, let me know how it goes. Cos i was thinking of getting a 2nd 40GB maxtor, and a 80gb one, and doing the same.

 

[StraightPipe]

does anybody know mcuh about mixed matched drive sizes in raid? say a 17GB and a 30? do you just lose the extra?

 

[BoomAM]

I think that its still possible to do stripping with different sized drives. Not 100% sure though. As before, look it up.

 

[OoteR02]

if you put them in stripping then you get a 17 (the smaller drives size) x2 (you have 2 drives) for 34 gigs of space. The extra is not available for use.