Hey Folks, I am a recording engineer, and haven taken the leap into a good strong computer. Because of the demands of accessing large audio files and large programs (Sonar, Wavelab and BDF Drums) I decided to build a reliable safe stable computer that will be stable and consistant do to the work I do. God help me if I ever loose a clients files! Anyway, I purchased a Winfast 760GXK8MB Motherboard, an AMD Sempron 2600+ Cpu, 1 gig, kingston ram, and 3 STA drives. I am brand new to Sata so here is where I will start. I have an 80 gig, for the OS (WIN XP Home), a 40 gig for BDF Drums (Bdf expresses the best quality is to have it own seperate drive. These 2 drive are connect to the motherboard wich has Serial/Serial Raid compatabilities. I have a Maxtor 200 gig, for audio accessing files which is connected to a SATA PCI card made by MAxtor. I also have a USB external case with a 200 Maxtor PATA drive installed just for backing up everything I need to. My first question is would it be worth using Raid 0, on Drives 1+2 (80 and 40 gig) considering they will not hold much file storage as they are primary OS drives. BDF is not an OS but is best installed on its own drive. If I stripe them will I have one drive? The questions is will BDF, still be operating on its own drive per say? I have only RAID 1, 0 and JBOD in the chipset which is a SIS 964 . Is there any special procedures I should know about before turning on the computer? Hardware is all installed just ready toi star set up. Thanks for the help, Rick
if you stripe the two drives windows will only see one drive. and if one breaks you loose the data on both. mirroring requires (as far as i know) the drives to be the same size, and windows will only see one drive with the storage of one drive, the second just holds a copy of the data, if one drive breaks, you stick a replacement in and it copies the data to the other drive. very safe. for your situcation, either buy another 200Gb sata and mirror them for security or leave them how they are. hope that helps
If $$$ is little or no object, you may want to look into getting a high-end SATA controller, that can do RAID-5. RAID-0 is not really a *true* RAID level, as there is no redundancy. Lose one drive, lose everything on both. RAID-5 requires a minimum of 3 drives, stripes your data across all 3, and then puts parity information on each drive. You can lose one drive, without losing the data, plus you get some performance gain from the striping. Also, while some controllers will let you build arrays from different sized disks, you're generally better off using drives of the same model/size/specs. In the case you suggested, using an 80GB and a 40GB drive for a RAID-0 array, you'd have 80GB capacity in the array, as the size will be based off the smallest drive in the array. Here's a decent enough Wikipedia article on various RAID formats:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID
