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SATA and IDE RAID

C

Cydrid

Junior Member
I recently bought a 320GB (7200RPM, 16MB cache, Sata) drive. My previous drive was a 120GB (7200RPM, 8MB cache, IDE). I was wondering if I can set up a RAID 0 configuration with both of them. I have a P4P800-E mobo that supports RAID, but for RAID are you able to mix IDE with SATA? Also, would the performance gain be worth the risk? The 120GB drive is about 2 years old. Would it even be an improvement, or should I stick to my current setup using the 320 as my main drive, and the 120 for the paging file, back up, and scratch?
 
You can't put drives of different sizes into a RAID without a loss in overall storage. So, by RAIDing those drives, you will be throwing away 200GB of data.

RAID is a waste except in certain instances. Keep your drives separate and partition them intelligently for the most benefit. I recommend using the faster drive for your OS, and the slower drive for backup/downloading/burning/etc.
 
You will end up with a 240gb drive, throwing away a lot of storage - the perfrmance benefits of raid0 are questionable for most normal use, and almost certainyl not better than what you get by having your page file on a separate drive.

My bias is to use my smaller drive for OS and programs and the other for media, storage, and workspace. Having the pagefile on a separate drive is beneficial if you actually use the pagefile; if you have a lot of Ram, it may not have any effect at all.

The biggest gain from multiple drives for me is in encoding; if your system is relatively powerful, having source and final files on separate drives can make a huge difference. (I used to notice this a lot for adding audio and the like to divx files; my system was never fast enough to benefit while actually encoding to divx, because the simultaneous r/w performance of the drive was always enough to keep up wth the system's ability to encode, and I alwasy had enough ram in the system to avoid hitting the pagefile during encoding).
edit - because I'm using a motherboard with decent onboard raid, I've always planned to add a third hdd to have my OS on a raid0 partition, but everytime I go to buy an new hdd, it's much cheaper to just buy a bigger drive, as available capacities increase, and so it's never seemed worth it.
 
Ah, thanks, I wasn't sure if you could set RAID up with different size hard drives without losing space or not. I do a lot of encoding as well so I'll keep that tip in mind. Also, as a side question, is there any way to move the Documents and Settings and Temp folders to another partition? I have my C partition set to only 10 gigs for the OS, but it fills up pretty quickly with the temp and local files unless I constantly monitor them and keep cleaning them up. I already moved my My Documents folder but I'm not sure if you're able to do the same with those other folders.

Oh, and also, if I were to buy another 120 GB drive to set up for RAID for things such as programs and the OS, since my current 120 is IDE, would I have to buy an IDE or would the RAID work with an IDE and SATA drive?
 
Depends on the controller.

If you are going to do a RAID 0 with two 120GB, why limit yourself to a 10GB partition?
 
No, I'm talking about my current setup using the 320 GB and 120 as separate drives. I made a separate partition for the OS and necessary programs, but I was wondering if I could move the Documents and Settings and Temp folder to a different partition. I'll stick with my current separate HDD setup until I get another drive to run RAID.

And my controller is the onboard one on my Asus P4P800-E board. It's a Promise IDE controller, but also has Sata support, but I don't know if it could run one with the other.
 
I don't think you'll be able to raid-0 a SATA and PATA drive together, at least not on that motherboard..plus like alreayd mentioned, you would waste a lot of space, and raid-0'ing the PATA drive to the SATA II drive, would actualy decrease the performance of the SATA II drive. My SATA II drive is almost as fast as my raid-0 36gb raptors were..
 
Haha, yeah, I'm currently using round ones for my IDE drive, and as I said, I'd probably buy another 120 GB drive just for the IDE RAID, but maybe I'm better off just waiting and saving up for another 320 SATA to set up in a RAID. Well thanks for the help, cleared up many things. Now I just have to figure out how to move those folder locations...
 
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