I am just throwing this out there...sorry if it has already been posted

I want to set up a raid:

1)Will be faster than just using a single disk...so must use striping

2)Requires redundancy...looking to have the mimimal, as long as I have it I am happy


For right now, cost won't be a factor. I am just looking to see what I can do.

RAID 5 would be great for you, but 5 isn't very popular or easy to implement. Given your requirements, I would do RAID 0+1, which would require 4 identical hard drives. SATA isn't up on RAID 0+1 yet, so ATA would be my choice here.

Let me get this right...

Raid 0+1 will allow me to stripe between 2 harddrives for faster reading and writing off the harddrive. The second pair will then allow me to mirror the 2 hd i am using to stripe.

Does the mirroring reduce the speed of my striping? I expect that I would need to have the same hd's for all 4?

What is the difference between SATA and ATA?

nubs

Yes, 0+1 is striping and mirroring, tho there is a slight difference between 0+1 and 1+0. ;) Anyway, which ever one you can get to work would be great!

No, the mirroring won't slow down your striping. Generally speaking, mirroring doesn't slow down a standard RAID 1 array, either.

It's recommended that all 4 hard drives are identical, and I would strongly suggest it, too. But they don't have to be the same. You'll just loose whatever is left over.

Oh boy. SATA vs PATA? SATA is the newest thing in hard drives right now, but you'd have to buy a really expensive SATA RAID card in order to do a 0+1 array, not to mention SATA hard drives are more expensive. I would stick with PATA RAID if I were you. It's often built into most "deluxe" type mobo's and the hard drives are cheaper, too.

Thanks for the reply saph,

I didn't know there was a raid 1+0. I looked it up and found that raid 1+0 is actually a little better than raid 0+1. Here's a link for anyone that would like to read about it:

http://www.ofb.net/~jheiss/raid10/

I will try to go with the raid 1+0 but I will need a mobo that supports the raid 1+0.

cheers,
nubs

I am so stupid.

There is actually a guide on this very website that talks about the raid im interested in.

http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/perf/raid/levels/multLevel01-c.html

sorry,
nubs