??? re: ASUS motherboards (RAID and Gigabit LAN)

[Kipa]

Thanks for checking out my questions. Continuing my questions about building my first PC (Part III).

I'm looking at the ASUS P4PE motherboard family and a couple newb questions about the options.

1) IDE RAID: Onboard IDE RAID Support(Controller) - What exactly is this? Do I need it for a gaming-intensive home PC.

2) Onboard LAN: BroadCom® 10/100 Mbps vs. Onboard Gigabit LAN: 100/1000 Mbs - What are the differences between these two? I basically have no idea what this is telling me.

Thanks in advance,
GaryJ

 

[BDawg]

Originally posted by: Kipa
Thanks for checking out my questions. Continuing my questions about building my first PC (Part III).

I'm looking at the ASUS P4PE motherboard family and a couple newb questions about the options.

1) IDE RAID: Onboard IDE RAID Support(Controller) - What exactly is this? Do I need it for a gaming-intensive home PC.

2) Onboard LAN: BroadCom® 10/100 Mbps vs. Onboard Gigabit LAN: 100/1000 Mbs - What are the differences between these two? I basically have no idea what this is telling me.

Thanks in advance,
GaryJ

1) RAID = Redundant Array of Independant (or Inexpensive) Disks. RAID allows you to use multiple HDs as one. RAID 0 (Striping) writes data across 2 disks to improve speeds. RAID 1 (Mirroring) writes the same data to two drives to improve reliability (1 dies, you can use the other).

2) Gigabit is (theoretically) 10x faster than 100 Mbps. You need Gigabit network equipment though.

 

[bgeh]

there are usually 2 types of raid supported on onboard controllers
one is raid 0(striping)a data block is split into 2 and then written on 2 seperate hard drives.so the speed doubles
raid 1(mirroring)the data block is mirrored into 2 hard drives.so it is normally used for data protection in case one hard drive fails

as for onboard lan.gigabit lan is definitely faster
but the technology is still new and isnt widespread,yet

 

[Kipa]

Thanks for the help all! I'm getting smarter all the time.

 

[Skysails]

I don't think RAID is necessary for the ordinary home user. I'm not sure if there advantages for gamers but my own experience is that I'd just rather use a straightforward HD backup and be able to choose when I do the backup. With RAID, any registry corruptions, incoming virus, etc. are instantaneously copied over to both drives. Unless you are a biz and need moment by moment data backup, it is better to avoid. Does not give anything, takes additional IDE drives and is a pain to configure with multiple OS.