How does RAID work?

cchen

Diamond Member
Oct 12, 1999
6,062
0
76
How exactly does RAID work? I'm getting an Abit kt7 with RAID on board. I have two hard drives, a 6.4 gig wd and a 20 gig maxtor, both are 5400 rpm udma/33. the wd is my boot drive and on the maxtor i have a bunch of videos, mp3's, games, etc. is it possible to put them in a raid config?
 

Athlon4all

Diamond Member
Jun 18, 2001
5,416
0
76
First yes, but the array will treat the 20GB as the smallest drive in the array (In this case a 6.4GB so the array will only have 12.8GB). Before I say anything more I suggest reading one of the best articles written by Anandtech, IDE RAID Comparision.
 

Citadel535

Senior member
Jan 16, 2001
816
0
0
Lol. That was a good one.

Storage Review has a good deal of information on RAID configurations but you must join for free to access it. It is a good site for information so I recommend you go there anyway.
 

NelsonMuntz

Golden Member
Jun 14, 2001
1,827
0
0
I would not suggest that you put those two hard drives together on a RAID array. It would not help your current situation at all. Most of the motherboards that include RAID also have the ability to use the RAID channels strictly as IDE channels so that it simply allows you to connect more IDE devices. This would probably be your best solution in this case.