Raid, SATA crash course needed

  • Thread starter Thread starter Woodchuck
  • Start date Start date
W

Woodchuck

1- can SATA and IDE coexist if set up as SATA for C: and IDE for CDROM and
other hard drives?

2- Can 2 SATA drives be set up as RAID0 and will there be a peformance
increase over a single SATA or IDE drive?

3-Western drives are advertises as regular and Caviar drives. Is there a
difference with the caviar drives if both have the same specs?

4-which western digital drives are suggested if not wanting the 10K drives?

thanks
 
If your motherboard supports both SATA and ide then you can mix . some
boards even allow a raid with mixed sata and ide drives. Raid 0 striping is
faster, however if either drive goes bad , you loose everything. I know
nothing about WD hard drives, but I love Seagate Barracudas
 
Woodchuck said:
1- can SATA and IDE coexist if set up as SATA for C: and IDE for
CDROM and other hard drives?
Click to expand...

Yes - I currently have two DVD-RWs and a Zip drive on IDE and two Maxtors on
SATA configured as RAID 0.
2- Can 2 SATA drives be set up as RAID0 and will there be a peformance
increase over a single SATA or IDE drive?
Click to expand...

Benchmarks show an approximate doubling of performance on simple reads and
writes over two non-RAID drives.
Subjectively I find it is noticeably faster in everyday use.
Some people claim that copying files from one place to another on the same
pair of drives is slower than from one single drive to another. This would
have an effect on paging data and would be more noticeable if you don't have
much RAM.
The security of your data is at the mercy of the weakest drive. However, I
am sure this fear by the non-RAID community is overstated.
I'm on my third RAID 0 PC and have never lost everything, in spite of having
one drive producing SMART errors and having to be replaced.
You should have a proper backup regime whether you use RAID or not.
3-Western drives are advertises as regular and Caviar drives. Is
there a difference with the caviar drives if both have the same
specs?
4-which western digital drives are suggested if not wanting the 10K
drives?
Click to expand...

I don't currently have Western Digital drives, so I can't comment.

John.
 
| 1- can SATA and IDE coexist if set up as SATA for C: and IDE for CDROM and
| other hard drives?

Yes, if the mobo supports it. What hardware components do you now have?

| 2- Can 2 SATA drives be set up as RAID0 and will there be a peformance
| increase over a single SATA or IDE drive?

Yes, if you run applications that can benefit from RAID0, like photo- or
video-editing software. Otherwise, using a fast single drive you may not
notice much difference.
I run two 36gb Raptors in RAID0 as C:, a 160gb Maxtor for D:, and rotate six
drives (mostly WD) in mobil racks for cloning with Norton Ghost. If I
didn't do photo editing and had a friend not given me a second Raptor drive
to incorporate into RAID0, I probably would still be running an all
single-drive system.

| 3-Western drives are advertises as regular and Caviar drives. Is there a
| difference with the caviar drives if both have the same specs?

Most EIDE and SATA drives are Caviars, with the exception of the Raptors
(10k rpm Enterprise drives) and a lower-performance Protege series. The
latter run at 5400 rpm but may be as reliable as the faster Caviars, which
operate at 7200 rpm, or perhaps even better.

For best performance outside the Enterprise series (Raptors), look for 7200
rpm drives with 8mb buffers.

| 4-which western digital drives are suggested if not wanting the 10K
drives?

Pick the size you need within the 7200-rpm, 8mb-buffer group for
performance, SATA or IDE. SATA and PATA (IDE) are very close in performance
for most applications and you can pick up some bargains for the latter if
you look around (e.g. www.dealnews.com). The 5400-rpm drives will not
dazzle you with their speed, but may be quieter and run cooler.
 
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