If I get the 120 gb WD hard drive tommorow, how do I set it up (w/ my existing HD)?

[50]

Hey, well I missed the 80 gb WD deal. Tommorow they will have the 120 gb Hard Drive for 50 bucks AR. Right now I have the 80 gb version. I was planning on getting another 80 and doing a RAID array. Can I still do this even though the drives are different sizes? I know nothing about RAID but one general question I have is what is the advantage of RAID vrs. just plug in the hard drive to the mobo(is this a completely pointless question?)? Can you reccomend me a cheap but good RAID card?

 

[mechBgon]

There's a good FAQ that will help explain RAID here. It would not be impossible to establish a RAID0 on two different-capacity drives but most of the time you would use identical drives. If you did set up RAID0 on an 80 and 120, it would come out to an 80GB array (size of the smaller drive).

In some situations it's better to have the drives be separate, so your applications can pull from one and write to the other. Copying my Office2000Pro SP3+ Administrative Installation Point from one SCSI drive to another takes about one-fifth the time of copying it from one part of one drive to another part, because one drive can read-read-read while the other writes-writes-writes, instead of the solo drive having to read-write-read-write. RAID0 doesn't change the drives' seek times, so it wouldn't help with that task much.

 

[0roo0roo]

well thats for scsi which has no problem accessing multple drives without bogging down. for ide, best to stay away from multiple drive access whenever possible.

but yes, 80gb would be your raid size..,.so wait for another sale on 120 or 80gb before you go raid.