RAID question, combining slow disks w/fast disks

[zugdud]

Hi, I am going to set up a RAID 0 stripe and currently am thinking about 2 possibilities....

(2) harddrives, both are 7,200 rpm ata 133 40 gb hard disks

or

(3) harddrives, 2 are 7,200 rpm ata 133 40gb while the other drive is 7,200 rpm ata 100 40gb

So my question is will having 3 drives in a raid 0 be faster then 2 drives if one of the three drives is ata 100 while the other 2 are ata 133??? or would it be faster to have simply 2 ata 133 drives in a raid 0?

Thanks

 

[fyleow]

RAID will always run at the speed of the lowest HDD. Running an ATA 133 with 100 should be no problem, the difference between the two ar neglible anyway. I should warn you that to get a speedy RAID it takes a lot of patience and reformatting (checking with stripe size is the best for your system) and your boot up will be slowed down by drive detection. I used to have dual 80 gig 7200 RPM ATA 133 Maxtor HDDs in a RAID 0 but now I am using a single Western Digital 120 GB 8 mb. I don't notice a difference. Unless you do video editing it's not really worth it. Remember that even though you have ungodly amounts of sustained transfer/reading most work is done in short bursts since they are relatively small files. That means your hard drive has to seek alot and adding all the drives in the world together won't help you with that. The seek time is still slow because it's IDE. If you want a real performance "increase" you should go with SCSI because it has a low seek time. I don't think I can recommend that either though, you're better off upgrading other parts of your system.