intel875 pro/lan1000 & raid

[allenfi]

If i'm building using the intel 875 mobo with raid and i use a maxtor 120gb @ 7200 rpm as a primary drive and a western digital raptor 36 gig @10000 rpm, will that be ok?
i thought i read where they should be the same.
any comments are appreciated.

[John Prophet]

yeah I think youd be better off with identical drives.

depending what form of RAID you use.

With raid 0 (striping) I wouldnt even try it with different drives etc.

With raid 1 (mirroring) you would only be using 36g of the 120g drive.

A cool raid article---> http://www.acnc.com/04_01_00.html

JP

[allenfi]

Thanks John
i don't understand "stripping" or "mirroring" so i'll read your link.
I'll comment later as well
Thanks again

[allenfi]

Wow!! looks complicated! I just wanna game and do some video editing occasionally. may not even need a raid config!
looks like raid 3 would be the best setup. Confirm??
my future system laying in boxes in my floor
Intel 875 pro lan/1000
3.2 intel with h/t
antec tru control 550 watts
gaintech 128mb 5900 ultra 1200
maxtor 120 gig@7200 (or western digital 36 gig@10000) tbd
mge uv blue clear case
liteon dvd/cd r/rw @8x
floppy
audigy 2 platinum zs soundblaster
1 gig (2@512) corsair xms low latency memory
coolermaster blue fans
and some other stuff

[John Prophet]

striping is when you take 2 or more drives and, instead of writing all the data to one drive..you write PART of the data to each drive at the same time...so if you ad 2 drives in a raid 0 configuration....and you were going to save a 1kb file....instead of saving the 1kb file to one drive you would be splitting it up and writing 500kb to the one drive and 500kb to the other drive AT THE SAME TIME....therefore its theoretically twice as fast


Mirroring is even simpler....it just means writing the same exact thing to two or more drives......or you could look at it as 100% backup....whatever you write to the 1 drive is also written to the other drive.....so if the first drive dies, you still have all the data on the other drive.


Raid 0 is for speed but not for critical data....

Raid 1 is for critical data like payrolls etc...but its not really any faster

There are other raid levels etc but usually for home setups and home type motherboards its either Raid 0 or raid 1

JP

[John Prophet]

nah..Raid 3 isnt even used much anymore...I think it used to be popular for servers but now servers use raid 5 almost exclusively.

I wouldt even worry about Raid...that raptor will be fast enough!

[golfcart]

If I were in your shoes, I would install the OS and other software on the raptor and use the other drive for data storage. I wouldn't even attempt to set up a RAID with those two disks.

[allenfi]

HEy
i really appreciate the input from both of you. Prob will look at golfcarts idea for the time being but won't overlook setting up raid
later (money).
Would "Raid 0" help my graphics card perform better though.

I'm kinda nervous about assembling all this stuff (my 1st).
I've been doing tons of reading. my eyes ar killing me

[John Prophet]

Raid 0 wont do anything for the graphics card...but if you are into gaming etc it will make things load faster off the hard drive....also it would make the video editing faster but the catch is it makes it easier to lose data also....for instance if EITHER drive in raid 0 goes down it means you lose all the data...so you have twice as much chance of losing the data.

If you used the raid 0 for the video editing you would also want to use some serious backup in case of problems.

Or...get 4 identical drives and use a form of raid called Raid 0+1...or Raid 10 (I cant remember which is which but one of them is fast and safe)


But like I said..that raptor will fly anyway so Id just use it.