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Ok, going SATA, have some Q's

C

Cook1

Diamond Member
Ok, I've only ever used IDE, but building me a whole new setup so going SATA. Do I need to buy any extra connectors? Going to be using the X-Connect 500W PSU. Also, would it be best to get one large HD say like 200GB, or two smaller ones say like 2x80GB?
 
Well I think you'd just need serial ata cables, and i'd probably go with 2 x 80 gb and set it up for raid 0. I'm kind of a fan of the western digital raptors 🙂 10000 rpm sata drives.
 
With Raid 0 I can put all my games and MP3's on one HD and the OS and all my system utilities on the other, correct?
 
RAID in general is not really worth it on the desktop. RAID 0 makes two or more drives act as one for performance reasons, though there's really no noticeable benefit in a desktop environment. Additionally, it can increase the risk of data failure. If you're going to use one drive for storage and one for OS/apps, you just use two separate non-RAIDed drives.

For SATA, all you'll need are SATA connectors, a SATA-compatible board, and possibly SATA power connectors if you don't have them already and the drive won't take a regular 4-pin.
 
+1 on the raid being worthless for your uses....

its explained in detail in one of anands review, benchmarks there too for you naysayers
 
I'd say just put two drives in there. Raid is incredibly risky, and offers no real performance gain. If you want to store your OS gand games on seperate hard drives, you can't use raid 0.
 
RAID 0 is the misnomer of the decade. Don't do it, as it doubles the chances for data loss. The "R" in RAID is supposed to stand for redundant, but there is none in RAID 0. RAID 0, AKA data striping, attempts to improve performance by splitting the data (which I'll represent as ABCDEFGH) across two drives, like this:

Drive 1:ACEG
Drive 2:BDFH

There are two problems: First, if one drive fails, the data on both drives is lost. Second, while striping theoretically can double the performance of a single drive, with IDE (yes, SATA is just a new flavor of the same old IDE), it doesn't actually work so well in practice because IDE does not perform particularly well at multiple simultaneous access. It does improve indicated performance in benchmarks because IDE striping can improve sustained transfer speeds, but everyday use is generally not about sustained transfer; it's about reading and writing small chunks of data at a time. (Striping across two SCSI drives would be a different story, performance-wise.)

Redundancy is only acheived by mirroring the data, like this (RAID 1):

Drive 1:ABCDEFGH
Drive 2:ABCDEFGH

Or like this, by combining the two techniques (RAID 0+1):

Drive 1:ACEG
Drive 2:BDFH
Drive 3:ACEG
Drive 4:BDFH

For more detail, you might want to give this AT article a read. They evaluate RAID 0 vs. single drive performance using 10,000 RPM Western Digital Raptors, but the same issues apply to any IDE RAID 0 setup.
 
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