what is dell's P/N for the 2nd modular HD caddy.Has anyone run raid on a laptop?

[holden j caufield]

I'm thinking of adding the same drive in a 2nd modular HD bay. I need the dell P/N I tried finding it in the software & peri. department but couldn't. I also wanted to know if anyone has run a software raid setup on a laptop and there experiences with it? Thinking about trying it on my beta version of Windows 2003 server RC2. Any noticeable improvement. This will be on a dell inspiron 8200 I'm ordering. Any hardware raid options on the Inspiron 8200? thanks

 

[holden j caufield]

oh yeah this will be run as a raid 0 setup. I'm just wondering if the performance is worth it? thanks

 

[Alptraum]

I doubt its anything you will want to do. Based on my experience with software RAID you will not get any performance benifet from using it and will quite likely take a performance hit. Software RAID just flat out sucks. At least it used to. I am not familiar with it under 2k though so maybe its gotten better. I really doubt it though. As far as hardware RAID I am unaware of any options like that for a laptop with the exception of using a SCSI card to an external array.

 

[CZroe]

Technically, anything from Promise or Highpoint is also software RAID. How do you explain the performance difference? It supposedly has the same CPU performance hit as any integrated IDE controller (Not talking about PCI bandwidth). The BIOS of the card runs the software on the host CPU continuously after booting just like the system BIOS. It's not a process in Windows so, of course, it doesn't show up

 

[Alptraum]

Heh, I was unaware of that and will bow out now. I am only really familiar with SCSI drives as far as RAID goes. I don't know much about IDE drives and RAID. Pretty much all my SCSI/RAID experience is with servers too. And in the past (I haven't bothered to try with W2k) softare RAID totally sucked.