RAID Set Up

[Terbinator]

Do i just buy an expansion card if i want RAID such as the Lycom ones off Scan ?

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Lycom...-and-JBOD)-NCQ

I plan on maybe getting 2 WD Cavier Black 500GB Drives and 'striping' them, anything else i should know on the hardware side of things for now ?

[GoNz0]

i looked at your specs, your board has very good built in raid already on it.

if you dont plan on reinstalling you can use the software raid built into windows, i doubt you could tell a cheap add on card from windows software raid anyway. infact when i had a tinker windows was faster than my old raid ide card

and back on that amd 64 xp4400 cpu it used all of 1% cpu when the drives were running

[alsenior]

make sure you have a good backup because your more likely to loose data with a Raid 0 set-up other that that have fun

[alsenior]

i looked at your specs, your board has very good built in raid already on it.

i had a look and the gigabyte listed the baord as having a ICH10 not the ICH10R which means no raid on the board

[GoNz0]

ahh well, still software raid, face it the cheap cards are software based anyway

[Terbinator]

So what do i do then guys - Card/no card ? is there a performance difference between a software set up and a hardware set up ?

[peterb]

An (expensive) hardware based solution will give you best performance. Whether that will be noticeable in practice is debateable.

Given the low cost of some of the hardware cards (under £20), it would proably be worth buying one just to try it out and then you can judge for yourself whether it is worth continuing with it or not.

[Terbinator]

Would i be best just buying a VelociRaptor, for improved speeds ?

[kalniel]

Would i be best just buying a VelociRaptor, for improved speeds ?

What kind of speeds do you want to improve?

[Terbinator]

Just general load times. File transfer speeds which are higher than what i get now would be sweet as well. Bear in mind im using an age old sammy - 120GB, 8MB cacche no NQC etc, a WD Green drive would porbably be faster

[kalniel]

Yup

Application Load times would be faster with either a Raptor, high density drive (>320gb/platter) or RAID, but the first two are a lot easier to set up/use Boot times would be highest with the Raptor, and good with a high density drive, but worse with the RAID setup.

[Terbinator]

Seems a Raptors the way to go, theres 2 version on scan though... which one do i get? Theres one where the SATA ports are exposed and another thats in a heatsink type thign as well but you can't see the ports 0.o

[kalniel]

Seems a Raptors the way to go, theres 2 version on scan though... which one do i get?

Get the faster and/or more capacitous one.

[DDY]

On scan there are 4 versions,

150GB VelociRaptor:
1500HLFS
1500BLFS

300GB VelociRaptor:
3000HLFS
3000BLFS

The HLFS drive is installed on the "IcePack" heatsink, you cannot detach the drive from this heatsink; if you look carefully at the drive itself, it doesn't have any connectors, instead these are placed on a daughter board towards the the bottom of the heatsink to make the drive+heatsink compatible with standard 3.5" connection fittings (e.g. external enclosure or backplane). Where as the GLFS which scan doesn't stock lacks the daughter card and instead the connectors are located on the actual drive rendering the drive+heatsink combo incompatible with the 3.5" standard. The BLFS is the drive on its own, i.e. sans heatsink, this is a standard 12mm 2.5" drive.

This SPCR review is worth a read - link.

...the IcePack is a joke, acoustically, adding all kinds of tonal, resonant harmonics excited by the vibrations of the drive