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Jimmy,
with RAID you are not way behind the curve, it recently became cheaper and
available not only for SCSI (can be very fast and is mainly used for
servers).
But RAID gives you more possibilites. You can connect more hd-drives (HDD) to
the card to gain either more security or higher speed.
Have a look here (or at the sites of RAID-Card-vendors), where everything is
explained:
http://www.uni-mainz.de/~neuffer/scsi/index.html
(Even if this link is meant for SCSI and Linux, the how, the what and the
benefits of a (serial) ATA or normal IDE Windows-system are the same).
In short:
1.) more secure (RAID 1)
connect 2 HDD to the card and every HDD has the same content, so if 1 HDD
breaks, just replace it and the content of the left HDD is morrored aagain to
the new one. The writing speed is only a (very) little slower, while the
read-speed can be a bit better.
2.) more speed (RAID 0)
connect 2 HDD to the card and every file is split on the two HDD. So the speed
of writing and reading is allmost doubled.
BUT if one HDD crashes everything (even the content of the other HDD) is gone.
Statistically the the danger of a HDD-crash is doubled!!
3.) with more HDD you can create variations of Combinations of 1) and 2)
Carl
Am Sonntag, 20. Juli 2003 01:54 schrieb Jimmy Snowden:
> This might be of interest to those that want a fast drive and or a
> RAID drive even if your board doesn't support it. I have no
> connection with any of these companies and in fact fell into this by
> accident and Google.com.
>
> I bought a new Maxtor 120 GB drive. This drive is SATA or serial ATA.
> So next I had to buy a PCI card to support the drive. I had used all
> my IDE connections up anyway. So I googled around and found some
> outfit in Houston called Directron.com. Got a HighPoint Rocket RAID
> Serial ATA PCI Host Card SA-PC02 Made in China card from them. So big
> deal but when I get it it not only supports drives larger than 137 GB
> like all the new SATA's do and Windows doesn't with out some help but
> it is SCSI also. It has two port? connectors so you can be RAID with
> two drives. Well this isn't my deal but it is a really cheap way to
> be able to be RAID able. I think I paid about $25 or $30 delivered for
> the card. So I install the new pretty fast drive and card, and with XP
> Pro it was so easy, and run a Hard Drive speed test. The drive is much
> faster than a 120GB Maxtor I just bought a month ago. Speed depends on
> the size files you are testing. on blocks of 30MB total test 300 MB it
> was about twice as fast. On a 150MB block size with total file size of
> 1.46GB it was still %20 faster. All I wanted was a second large drive
> that would be faster so TS2ki would be easier to run, but this might
> be a bonus that others are interested in more speed and RAID.
>
> Now I have not setup the RAID and probably will not but you could buy
> one of these cards and a couple of SATA drives and be running for
> about $300 delivered. That isn't bad. Then again it will probably be
> cheaper next week. Oh the drive came from Fry's but it may not be
> available tomorrow knowing them, but there are tons of SATA drives for
> sale.
>
> Please don't email me and tell me I'm way behind the curve and this
> stuff is old hat. I do my best to stay up.
>
> Jimmy Snowden
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