ATA 66 RAID vs ATA 100 RAID

[golfcart]

Hi all, I'm going to be setting up my first personal striped RAID setup. I'm doing this purely for a speed boost. I have an old Promise 66 controller card that I know can be modded into a RAID card fairly easily. I'm trying to do this on a budget so I'm not sure if it would be worth buying an ATA 100 RAID card or just modding my ATA 66 card. Do you think there will be a big difference? What would you do in my shoes? Thanks

[John Prophet]

you can get cheap ata100 raid cards for less than $20.

one issue could be drive capacity on the ata66.

BUT, having said that..frankly I dont think youll see a speed difference between 66 and 100.

http://www.acortech.com/.sc/ms/dd/10...0Cards--IDE%20^2F%20Serial%20Controllers/486/ATA133%20IDE%20CONTROLLER%20RAID%20CARD%20RETAIL%2 0BOX

[golfcart]

Thanks for the quick reply JP Can you point me towards those cheap cards?

Ok I guess you did

[golfcart]

What kind of speed increase is normal going from 1 7200rpm ATA 100 to a striped pair?

[John Prophet]

going to Raid 0 (striped pair) could give a decent spped jump I guess...maybe not hair raising but then it could depend on what you use it for etc.

Of course you know..dont put anything vital on it unless you have good backup cuz Raid 0 is the most likely to lose data cuz you have 2 drives and if EITHER messes up, you lose all data...so you have twice the normal chance to lose it.

[golfcart]

I plan on using 2 new matching 120 gig drives for the array and I have an old trusty 120 gig drive that I will probably keep on the onboard controller to store any important backup data. I also transfer my very important data to a thumb drive daily and cdr weekly. I think that will be safe enough

[John Prophet]

yeah, lol....then again, my parents thought they were being safe enough..but here I am....

[golfcart]

lol I'm sure mine felt safe too... Not all mistakes are bad Isn't there a way to do a 0+1 setup with three drives?

[John Prophet]

dont think so...you need 4 for either 0+1 or Raid 10

http://www.acnc.com/raid.html

0+1

10

I wont SWEAR that those diagrams are right..I have looked at em from time to time but seems something aint right..but I cant remember which one seems amiss....maybe I just have a hard time visualizing them.

JP

you can do raid 5 with 3 drives....Raid 5 is almost always used on servers.

and now they have something called raid1.5 http://www6.tomshardware.com/storage/20030620/

from what Ive read though it aint much but hype

[golfcart]

According to that site, RAID 1 has "Twice the Read transaction rate of single disks, same Write transaction rate as single disks." I have never heard this before. Can anybody verify it? If it's true, I may go with that setup. I don't do a ton of writing to the hard drive. I'm looking for faster boot times, faster game loading and things like that. The machine is used for surfing, gaming, accounting and things like that. I don't do any video or audio editing. Do you think that would be better because of it's redundancy?