A few RAID questions

[Morph]

I'm thinking of setting up RAID 0 (striping) with my two Maxtor 40 GB drives. Here are my questions:

1) This first one is not really a RAID question per se. I'm wondering if ATA controllers on an add-in PCI board get as much bandwidth as the ATA controllers built into the motherboard. I mean, with an add-in card you have to go through the 32-bit 33MHz PCI bus. Do the built-in motherboard controllers have this same pipe to the memory/cpu or do they have a bigger one? If the built-in motherboard ATA controller has some advantage here, wouldn't that limit the performance advantage of an add-in RAID card?

2) My drives are the same size but they are different generation drives, one being ATA66 and one being ATA100. Would it be worth it to set up RAID with these two drives?

3) To set up RAID, do I have to back up all the data on both hard rives and start with empty drives?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Pariah]

RAID 0 is striping.

Bandwidth isn't much of an issue when dealing with drives that barely break 40MB/s.

The two ideally should be the same, but those are probably close enough.

You have to empty the drives before you can initialize the array.

 

[Windogg]

RAID0 = Striping = Misnomer
RAID5 - Striping w/ Parity (3 drive minimum).

Windogg

 

[Morph]

Sorry I meant RAID0

 

[Windogg]

RAID1 = Mirroring

 

[Morph]

Thank you, I was thinking of RAID 0. I don't care about fault tolerance i just want increased performance and I want the two 40 GB drives to look like one big 80 GB drive.

 

[nippyjun]

The raid should work fine with 2 different drives, but they will run at 66 not 100.

 

[RoninRXN]

Hmmm...so which should you use with 3 identical drives? I haven't heard much in that regard around here? I might buy 2 more 40gig 60GXPs...

 

[Another]

Raid 5 (requiring 3 drives) is only possible in a SCSI setup.

 

[Windogg]

<<< Raid 5 (requiring 3 drives) is only possible in a SCSI setup. >>>

Nope.

Windogg

 

[Pariah]

There's not much you can do with 3 IDE drives that would be practical. RAID 0 with 3 IDE drives is a bad idea, RAID 5 will have abysmal performance. Probably the best you could do is RAID 1 array for OS/apps with a card that load balances reads and use the 3rd drive for storage. If you had 4 drives, RAID 0+1 would be a good option, though not the most cost effective.

 

[RoninRXN]

Damn...because I was looking at a trade and the guy wants to sell them as a pair. Anyone got a spare 40gig 60GXP?

 

[cbuchach]

As for bandwidth between an onboard controller or an add-in PCI card, they would have the same bandwidth. An onboard controller is on the PCI bus and at least on my board will share IRQ's with a PCI slot.