OK, can someone define RAID and SATA for me please?

Question

OK, so im building a gaming pc and im looking for a motherboard. I understand terms like PCI-e, DDR-2 and AM2. The only terms that I am not familiar with are RAID and SATA. Can someone break it down for me on a basic level?
Thanks for your wisdom.

Answer 1

RAID = "Redundant Array of Independent (or Inexpensive) Disks"
It means that you can connect several hard drives to the PC and have them look to your operating system as one large volume, which either provides redundancy (in case one drive should fail) or speed by allowing the PC to write to the drives simultaneously.

SATA = "Serial Advanced Technology Attachment"
Next generation hard drive bus. Much smaller connector than traditional IDE/ATA drives, faster, and (at least in the external version) the ability to connect and disconnect drives without shutting the machine down.

Answer 2

I disagree with the suggestion that an SATA drive means it's going to be faster than IDE. That's completely false. In fact, the fastest IDE interface was developed by Maxtor and is rated at 133MB/s. The original SATA specification is 150MB/s (only a 13% increase over IDE). And that's the interface folks, not the drive. The only time it pays to have that extra 13% is when you have several drives striped in a RAID array sucking up all that bandwidth. Even then, it's hard to notice any benefit over IDE. For a single drive, there is none (but read below to see some exceptions)

It is wrong to look at the top speed of the interface. Most hard drives average only 40-45MB/s transfer rates, because mechanically, there's only so much they can do. A lot of it depends on how data is spread out on the drive. As you can see, 45MB/s can be easily covered by IDE or SATA. That's why you see many drives released for both.

2nd generation of SATA (also called SATA II or SATA 2.0) have extra features like Native Command Queuing (NCQ) which can significantly decrease disk access time. In some cases, you could see as much as a 15-20% increase in overall performance over a standard SATA or IDE hard drive.

It is important to also realize that 2nd generation SATA (SATA II) is NOT necessarily the same thing as SATA 3.0 Gb/s. The "3.0 Gb/s" rating is just a "feature" that is sometimes considered to be "a part of" SATA II.

Don't be fooled by the 3.0 speed rating either. It is talking about the bandwidth being wider on the channel to allow more traffic through at once. It's not really talking about the speed of data being transferred. Think of a single hard drive as a single car travelling down a 2-lane highway. SATA 3.0 Gb/s is like widening it to 4 lanes, but keeping the speed limit the same. To one car, that's not going to make a difference -- to many, it will. You start to see the benefit when you have many drives in large arrays (RAID) sharing that bandwidth.

Answer 3

SATA = Serial ATA or Attachement.
SATA Hard Drives have a faster connection to the system that Parallel ATA.

RAID is a way of configuring 2 or more hard drives to mirror each other. In a simple config, you put 2 drives in. They both contain the same information. This is for speed, redudancy and data safety (one drive crashes, you have the complete image on another).

Answer 4

If you are a gamer, then SATA means faster disk access, RAID means lots faster disk access (particularly RAID 0 for gamers, its cheap and fast but no added data protection). Faster disk access means reducing one of the biggest bottlenecks in your PC. The technical terms are above.