SATA and IDE RAID

[Cydrid]

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?

 

[DARQ MX]

It depends. How many drive do you have?

 

[Cydrid]

Sorry, I hit Enter before I finished the post, but filled it in now.

 

[Cydrid]

Any advice?

 

[diapickle]

wouldn't you lose 200G if you raid 0?

 

[Cydrid]

I thought 0 was striping the data?

 

[RaiderJ]

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.

 

[3chordcharlie]

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.

 

[Cydrid]

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?

 

[RaiderJ]

Depends on the controller.

If you are going to do a RAID 0 with two 120GB, why limit yourself to a 10GB partition?

 

[Cydrid]

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.

 

[stevty2889]

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..

 

[foodfightr]

Better get rounded cables for an IDE raid.

Heh heh heh

 

[Cydrid]

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...