setting up RAID for dummies (me lol)?

Question

so im planning on making my own computer , i have a choice of getting a 250 gig 16mb cache HDD or setup a RAID with 2 80 gig 8mb cache drives , would the 2 80 gigs be faster than the 250 gig ? and how hard is it to install RAID (hardware, drivers, settings ,ect)

p.s i have an average knowledge about computers

Answer 1

Well there are some questions to be asked here.

1) Are the hard drives your getting "SATA", or "IDE"
2) What speed (RPM) are the hard dives running at?
3) How fast is the CPU, how much RAM does it have?

Let's say: that the 250 HD is a SATA at 7200 RPM and the 80 gig is a SATA at 10,000 RPM then I would say the two 80 gigs would be faster, HOWEVER if the computer itself is slow, of course your bottle neck would be in CPU or RAM and having faster hard drives would be pointless.

Let's say (two): if the 250gig and the 80gig are both 7200 RPM running IDE or SATA, then just stick with the 250. You will get a slight speed improvement, but you wont really notice it. However the speed of the CPU and RAM could affect it as well.

Let's say (three): if you want to raid it, then check to see if your motherboard has a built in raid, otherwise buy a board that has built in raid, external raids are somewhat complicated to work with if you aren't that deep / experienced with computers. Setting up the boot from a Raid can be a pain as well as getting them to format and to get the OS on there properly. If your on-board does not support raid, stick with the 250 and worry about it later.

IF you wish to try, then buy a known external raid to save from driver trouble. (i.e. - Maxtor Raid Card, Western Digital Raid Card, or the very well known Adaptec Raid Cards.)

For most all computers, the hard drive can be the slowest primary device used in the computer (exception of Floppy Disks, Flash Drives, CD-ROM, etc.) If you have a fast computer and lots of RAM and you know for a fact that the Hard Drive is slowing you down, that should be the only time you should resort to a Mirror 0 striping. It is a fast way to go, but any slight glitch of a hard drive malfunction can cause one of the biggest nightmares in data-recovery because everything's not on one drive...

Hope this helps,

- Smopy.

Answer 2

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