Upgrade to RAID or SATA?

[xephalon]

I'm planning to spend a bit of cash and upgrade several components in my comp, including processor, mobo, and hd. I have a Seagate Barracuda 80GB Ultra-ATA100 7200rpm EIDE hd - ST380011A on my system and I'm looking to upgrade my hd for a boost in space and hopefully performance too. At this time, would you get another identical barracuda for IDE RAID 0 or just get a bigger Serial ATA drive or maybe even two smaller SATA drives for SATA RAID 0? Given of course I'll get a new motherboard to support the RAID options... Your suggestions/opinions would be appreciated!

 

[vailr]

I'd recommend Seagate drives, due to their 5 year warranty, speed & quietness.
Since SATA is more "future-proof", go with SATA-Raid.
So: two 80, 120, or 160 GB [paired sizes varying, according to budget/need] SATA drives, Raided.
If you wanted to save some money, you could use an Abit "serillel adapter", to allow using the one 80 GB IDE drive and one new 80 GB SATA drive in SATA-Raid. Although, probably not as speedy as two "Native SATA" drives would be.

 

[jimmy43]

If you are upgrading soon, i would wait for SATAII to come out. It will be monumentally faster than running RAID and shouldnt cost a whole lot more. It's supposed to come out by the end of the year but who knows...

If you want to keep it cheap, just get a large SATA drive with NCQ and it will be faster than having a raid setup. RAID setups are quite pointless and theres a reason their only used in server environmenets. You will not feel and noticable speed boost. The only reason id ever run raid is for data backup but im not that rich.

Good luck!

 

[xephalon]

Thanks for all the input. So it seems that RAID is not as much of a performance boost as just an SATA upgrade... and SATA RAID would of course be even better, if I can afford 2 SATA drives.

Just a couple of other questions:

Do you have to format all the data on existing drives when you switch to RAID 0?

Also, is it possible to put two different brands of 80GB ATA-100 7400rpm drives together for RAID 0?
(a friend of mine is giving up a Western Digital Caviar SE 80GB WD800JB which I'm thinking of pairing with my barracuda 80GB ST380011A)