Number of IDE drives

[Nitrogen]

If you have a couple of hard drives installed in one machine, how slow would the system run?

Let say 4 SATA drives and 2 IDE HDD's and 1 x DVD-RW and CD-ROM.

 

[ScrapSilicon]

Hello and Welcome to AnandTech forums ! [/b]
shouldn't ..

 

[Nitrogen]

Is it true that if you put your main OS on a SATA drive, your system will be a bit faster?

Also, someone told me that I could raid my one SATA drive and use it as my main drive with OS on it, it will be more faster? What type of raid should I use?

Thank you.

 

[Mik3y]

no its not true. there is no performance difference between sata and ide. sata is just for the conveniences. if you run raid, it should be a bit faster. as for your system slowing down, the more data you have in your harddrive, the slower it gets, so its best to have one drive set for windows, apps, and games, and another drive for storage. you should run raid 0.

 

[Klixxer]

Well, the truth is that every IDE drive in your system uses your CPU, so yes, it does.

Don't be confused by the theoretical transfer rates either, they are not going to go anywhere near that, if you need more speed, get more memory and use a bigger cache.

 

[tcsenter]

Well, the truth is that every IDE drive in your system uses your CPU, so yes, it does.

Sure, when the drive is being accessed for reads or writes. Just sitting there spinning, no.

How many drives can one read from or write to at once (hint: EIDE is not like SCSI)?

 

[Lonyo]

Originally posted by: Nitrogen
Is it true that if you put your main OS on a SATA drive, your system will be a bit faster?

Also, someone told me that I could raid my one SATA drive and use it as my main drive with OS on it, it will be more faster? What type of raid should I use?

Thank you.

You need at least 2 drives to be able to set up any form of RAID.
RAID-0 increases speed, drives are "striped" so data is written to both, meaning it's faster to write (IIRC). But if one drive dies, the whole RAID setup is dead, as the data is shared between both drives. You need at least 2 drives, but can have more.
RAID-1 increases security of data (it creates a copy so you don't lose data, but this halves the space you have: eg, 2 80GB drives in RAID-1 would hold a max of 80GB data, both drives woudl have the same data on them, likea mirror image). Needs at least 2 drives, but can have more (in pairs usually, obviously).