HDD/RAID/asrock advice request

[kalniel]

Having been a staunch supporter of buying the best single hard drive you can afford rather than going to RAID 0, I'm beginning to find some of my usage is tending towards that which might benefit from RAID 0 (large, sequential transfers). As such I'm investigating my options.

The important thing to note is I'm on an ASRock 939 dual Sata2 motherboard.

I'm currently running a single 7200rpm 2mb cache drive off the IDE133 channel, I have a dvd-writer off the 100 IDE channel. The motherboard then has two sata ports, presumably running off the ULI M1567 South Bridge, and a single JMicron chip provided sata2 port, which technically connects through PCI-E. The website and packaging indicate the possibility of running RAID from the two sata ports, but I can't find any reviews of the performance of the ULI controlled RAID. I know that were it an NVidia or Intel RAID controller I'd be happy with the performance, so does anyone know how the ULI chip stacks up?

I'm still not convinced that Sata2 or NCQ provide any performance difference, but the option is there to just stick a bigger/higher cache disk on the sata2 port and not run RAID at all.

Obviously I have everything installed on the IDE drive at the moment, so it would just be easier to add disks without bothering the OS, but come Vista does anyone know if it's possible to run multiple boot options across different disks? That way I could leave XP on the IDE drive and have Vista on the sata2 or raid 0 sata1 disks.

[this_is_gav]

Never used this particularly ULi chipset for anything other than a single disk, but I did have RAID0 on a M1575 in my old ASUS board, and it was fine. There's certainly no noticeable differences between it and my Intel ICH8R in a basic RAID0 array.

Just remember with RAID0 that one hard drive down means that all data will likely be lost unless you want to pay someone a LOT of money to try and rescue it. It's nearly always beneficial to run the RAID0 array solely for applications and the O/S install, and have 3rd single drive for data, documents and any other critical files.

That said, I've never had a drive failure on any array I've had (and I've been using RAID0 from 2001 both at home and on my work PC). Still, the chances of failure are obviously double that of normal.

[silent]

i had this board and run a ide hdd and a sata disc on it fine.

when you set up windows, it detected both and enabled dual os setup so whta you are doing should be fine.

i did it once with xp and 98 and it was fine. but then the hdd packed up shortly afters.