I was planning to get myself a P5B motherboard for overclocking E6400. However, I found that that mobo has some problems with supporting RAID. The problem is that I don't really know what RAID is and never used it before. All I know it has something to do with connecting harddrives. So, question 1: What the heck is RAID in the first place, and how is it used? Online descriptions weren't very helpful. Question 2: If I'm planning to use several SATA harddrives with P5B, one of 80Gb, one of 250Gb, and one of 320Gb, each partitioned in 2 smaller drives, will it be affected in any way by board's problems with the RAID controller, or is RAID something that I must activate by myself, or use some additional hardware for it? Or, maybe, I can live without it?
Please answer all questions as objective as possible. Thank you for your time.
2007-01-27 03:57:41 · 3 answers · asked by Negotiator 3 in Computers & Internet ➔ Hardware ➔ Desktops
If it's of any help, I'll use it with WinXPPro, and withhold getting Vista for a while.
2007-01-27 04:00:58 · update #1
I probably didn't ask the correct question. So, here's yet another question in addition to the first 2: If I don't want to deal with RAID at all - is it possible or is RAID something that will be used whether I want it or not?
2007-01-27 06:04:32 · update #2
Question 1: RAID is Redundant Array of Inexpensive Drives. It's used to increase fault tolerance, increase capacity, and increase performance. This MB supports RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10. Each RAID level offers some advantages with some tradeoffs. See here for details http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels
Question 2: You might not want to use RAID with 3 hard drives all of differing sizes. The capacity of all other drives in an array will only be as large as the capacity of the smallest member of the array. Your 320GB drive would only have 80GB usable capacity if used in a RAID with an 80 GB drive.
2007-01-27 05:51:41 · answer #1 · answered by foobarred 3 · 0⤊ 0⤋
From what you said you are not interested in RAID, so you don't need to worry about it, it is purely optional. You can read about it if you want, but since you are using different size hard drives, RAID would not be a very good option for you.
2007-01-27 09:26:41 · answer #2 · answered by mysticman44 7 · 0⤊ 0⤋
from what i understand, raid allows your system to see all drives as one, so a little faster indexing. would also allow bugs to travel faster.
2007-01-27 04:46:57 · answer #3 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 0⤋