RAID, not the spray kind :)

[xpDan]

Just wondering, If I were to get a motherboard wth RAID (Abit KX7-333R) for example. How does IDE drives work with a motherboard with RAID? I don't need or want data replication or redundancy, how would that work in this case?

 

[DIRTsquirt]

Read this or just poke around in the faq link

 

[xpDan]

Can you disable RAID on a motherboard having it run "like" a regular IDE ?

 

[jiffylube1024]

If you buy a motherboard with 2 IDE ports with RAID capability, sure you can run them like normal IDE ports.

If you mean can you run, say 2 HD's in raid so that they give you twice the speed and zero redundancy (RAID 0 or 1, I don't remember which one this one is), and then decide you want them as independent drives, you can't just switch them back to normal without reformatting.

 

[xpDan]

Yeah, that would be the plan, running them like to regular IDE without any RAID.

As I understand it, I could have my two HD running in RAID in such a way that both are accessed in parallel, making it twice as fast like you claim? But how does manipulating partitions and drives work with RAID? Does it make a big difference having it in RAID vs IDE? Plus, if anything goes wrong, there is no way to get back the data which was stored. While with IDE you could still get access to it but at worst, only that drive fails, not the rest.

 

[FIFO]

It is not RAID vs IDE. It is RAID vs Non-RAID.

A very good place to go for reviews is www.storagereview.com. The reviews that they do there show the real benefits of RAID as best as possible.

The biggest indicator of whether you want to use RAID or not is typically "Are you impatient when games are loading" or "Do you do LOTS of video or audio editing". Other than this, you will not see much benefit.

There are a few things to keep strongly in mind though:

- Never bother to use more than 2 drives on the "Fake" RAID controllers that come on mobos or that you get for $20. "Fake" RAID uses the system CPU to process its i/o transactions. It also does not have read/write cache built onto the controller. Real RAID cards, even for IDE, come with at least a RISC processor build right on them. They also have at least 16MB of r/w Cache. Some even have as much as 128MB. Two devices on one IDE channel cannot operate in parallel. This is really bad for overall performance. Real IDE RAID cards come equipped with an IDE connector for each drive. This allows parallel communication to and from all drives.

- If you do use RAID 0, buy a tape backup drive or burn all of your sensitive data often. RAID 0 is striping with no parity. When one drive dies you loose ALL data on BOTH drives.

Good luck and have fun!!!

Jason.