I want to upgrade my storage with speed. Do I get a RAID 0 or the SATA 2 ?

Question

I am plan on buying a controller card, but not sure which interface has faster transfer rates.

Answer 1

Get a SATA 2 controller card then set up a raid with it. If you don't mind losing all your data when one hard drive crashes then a raid 0 will be sufficient if you would like to be able to save your system then you may want to try a raid0+1. Here is a website explaining the different types of raid's:

http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid5_gci214332,00.html

Good Luck HTH

Answer 2

SATA Raid 0 is the best option you can go for.... But you have to remember that the risk with 2 HDDs is higher than having 1 HDD for an example

say you buy 2 x 160 GB with SATA raid 0 - you get a total of 320 GB effective capacity.
& you buy a 320 GB SATA 2 Hard disk instead, first method gives you much higher performance but the potential risk that 1 harddisk malfuncioning is higher in first, ( if 1 goes down in Raid 0 everyting has to be done from the begining & data on other HDD will be unusable... )

So its up to you,

To sum up

RAID 0 is much better in performance than SATA 2

Cheers
Codered

Answer 3

RAID is the faster option as it only writes half of the data to one hard drive and the other half to another hard drive. Now, if this RAID array were to crash, it's extremely difficult to reconstruct the array and recover documents lost due to the crash. SATA is a faster hard drive (compared to IDE), so this would be the ideal first upgrade. Get just one now, enjoy the benefits of SATA. If you want to go faster later, get a second hard drive of the same kind and speed and setup a RAID array. Let us know if you need help setting up a RAID array if you decide to do that.

Regards,

Brandon

Answer 4

Have you considered going with Ultra-640 SCSI disk and a RAID 0+1 setup?

Raw bandwidth available:
Serial ATA (SATA-150) -- 150 MB/s
Ultra-3 SCSI 160 -- 160 MB/s
Serial ATA (SATA-300) -- 300 MB/s
Ultra-320 SCSI -- 320 MB/s
Ultra-640 SCSI -- 640 MB/s

Then you can use the 15K RPM drives.

Of course with this configuration you are going to spend a good chunk of money but you'll have fast disk and redundancy.