Help with LARGE HD setup

[smartermoney]

Here is what i have
Dell 8300 P4 3.2 800FSB
1G Ram
ATI 9800 Pro
DVD drive
DVD+RW drive
I currently have an 80G HD And 120G HD
I am going to be doing some DV Editing and i want some major space
I also have a Canon Digital slr and my pics are 5-8mb each so i also need space for those.
I am going to be getting dual 250GB HD's to install.
Am i correct in that i need a pci card because of the HD size? Do i need 2? or go raid?

I know someone will be able to help me and tell me which is the best way to hookup the 2 -250's i want. Thanks
PS i know about enough to get myself into trouble so please be specific

 

[pcman83]

Hey whats up,

The 250s if they are retail are going to come with a card to plug into a pci slot. If not you can get one off of newegg for cheap. The best way to hook these up would probably be just to plug them into the pci controller. If you go raid there are a couple things you could do: Raid 0 or 1. Now raid 0 is called striping its nice and fast but it sucks for data redundency. What happens is that the drive splits up the data like this:

Drive A B
File 1 2
3 4
5 6
And so on.

It makes your data speed really fast but if one of the drives crash you lose everything, I actually had this happen and i will never go back to raid unless i get raid 5.

Now you could use raid 0 and it backs up everything on one drive to the other. But then you only have 250gb instead of a 500.

So i think the best way would be to hook them up on a controller.

Here is a link to a good one

http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=16-102-027&depa=1

IF they are sata drives get this

http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=16-102-013&depa=1

whichever one you get all you need is one. You just hook one drive with a cable to one of the ide connectors and the other drive to the other connector, dont do a master slave config becuase that will be slower if both the drives are accesed

good luck

Mike

 

[OZEE]

Yes, you're going to need a pci card. It will (most likely) have two channels (Primary/Secondary), each of which will support 2 drives (Master/Slave) - so you'll only need 1 card.

Are you planning to set up the dual 250's as RAID or individual drives?

 

[smartermoney]

whatever is better. One of the drives is a new WD special edition and it comes with a pci controller card the other is an oem drive from a fellow anand. member. This is all i need? No other cables? then i can setup as a C...E drive (example)
Also i am currently running the drives. Can i use ghost to send the info from my old 80G to the new 250 where the OS is ? (win xp pro)
Soory about all the Q's just want to get it right

 

[smartermoney]

still need to know:
Can i use ghost to send the info from my old 80G to the new 250 where the OS is ? (win xp pro)

 

[chocoruacal]

Do not put your operating system on the same drive where you'll be doing A/V editing. Skip the RAID because you don't need it. Setup both of the drives on their own channel on the PCI card. Use one drive for source material and the other for a destination when you encode.