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I have 2 IDE RAID cards and 5 hard disks, but i still havent set up a RAID array. how noticable is the performance difference?
and how much effort is required for the setup
1x ATA66 Abit miscallenous RAID card
1x Adaptec ATA RAID 1200A (ATA100) Raid Controller
Any pointers before i waste a day and end up dissppointed.
RAID 0 is fast, but unreliable. I used to run 2 x 40gig Maxtor 7200rpms in Raid 0, but gave up after it failed twice in 2 months, meaning I lost all my uni work, music, videos etc.
What are the exact drive's you've got? Raid works best with Identical Drives.
2x WD 30Gb (Identical Drives)
1x Maxtor 40Gb
1x Maxtor 80Gb
What speed are the 2 30gig Drives? 5400rpm, or 7200rpm?
Raid 0 would be best in your setup, of which install your OS on, and all applications. Use your 80 and 40 gig drives for Media drives, all your documents, music, films etc. This means if your Raid Array fails, you only need to re-format, not spend months rebuilding your music collection, and loosing work forever.
With Raid, windows seems that little bit more responsive and smotther, don't ask me why though, I can't really explain, but everything seemed more instant. It was especially noticeable in boot up times, loading game levels, etc etc. Anything that required alot of data to be read or shifted about flew :)
Go for it dude, you won't regret it (until it fails :p)
All my drives are 7200rpm i dont believe in 5400rpm :)
Will be running either XP or 2k Pro havent decided yet. but i do find 2k to respond faster as a whole anyway.
I have had the same 2 drives in raid0 on 2 different motherboards for over a year and never had anything fail. So I would say go raid0 with your 2 identical drives m8, it really speeds things up. Do as dawson says and use the others as media or backup drives!
Good luck
How about setting up a RAID0 with your WDs and either use 80GB (bit of a waste) or a cheap 60GB for an image (your ass is then covered!! :D )... ;)