Well I have to post this here, no section on hard drives. Couple questions:

Will an ATA133 cable work with ATA100 hard drives?
Can any two identical hard drives be set up in a RAID array?

Can I have only two hard drives in the RAID array or do I have to have a third one on its own for booting windows? (Basically can I only have RAID drives)

And last one: Is RAID good/worth it?

Hi there..

All 80pin ide cables work for drives on ata66 to ata133.. these are generally refered to as ata100 cables and have more wires on them than ata33 cables.

From what I kinda know any drives can be raided up together, but the raid process will only make use of the same amount of space. Say u had an 80gig and a 60, raid will make the 80 the same siz\e as the 60 but u will lose the other 20 gig.

Its good pratice tho to get drives that are near identical.. ie same make, same ata interface etc.

Raid is normally made up of 2 drives. You can actually boot windows from a raid config so u wouldnt need a seperate hard disk. But u can use extra hdd if u wanted

Raid has its benefits, most raid controllers allow either stripe and mirror..
Stripe raid causes the data to be distributed over the 2 hdds as tho it was only 1 hdd, basically creating more throughput as the data is striped off the drives alternately.

Mirror makes a copy of the data from 1 hdd on to the second hdd so is good if u need a backup of all the data u have.

The idea setup would be stripe and mirror but not sure how this is implimented.

Thats what i kinda understand with raid.. hope it helps

tata
Peav

the benifits really start to show when you take a couple 8mb cache 7200rpm drives and stripe them because now you have a 16mb buffer and 14k spin effective speed speed or even better a couple raptor hard drives that have 10krpm for an effective 20k!!! of course those drives are alot smaller..

I don't need size but if I can get speed I'll take speed

but if you go raid ... search the forum there was a topic about that .... always remember if any of the disk fails you will loose ANY data 2nd ... get a raid controllercard !!! else you will have much troublen when you must switch the RAID chip and its maybe incompatible to the old array