Raid questions for a newb

[agathodaimon]

Right now I have two drives hooked up in Windows... NOT in any sort of raid configuration.

One is a Western Digital 320GB (16mb cache, SATA) drive, and the other is a Hitachi 80GB (8mb cache, SATA) drive.

Everything is on the WD drive... But really, I'm not happy with the load/save times I'm getting when gaming... It's a bit disappointing.

Would it be possible to either:
1. Add the 80GB to the 320GB drive in a raid setup or
2. Get another 320GB drive and set them up in a raid array without losing my windows installation?

Any thoughts on this?

I would need a controller card... My Gigabyte DS3L motherboard doesn't seem to come with one, unless I am just missing something.

Which controller cards should I look for? I would definitely like to keep it under $100...

Thanks

 

[Nothinman]

Not in a way that will increase performance much. You can probably create a RAID1 array non-destructively with another 320G drive but it won't be as fast as a RAID0 setup. And even with RAID0 the performance increase isn't really worth the risk since if you lose one drive you lose the entire array.

 

[agathodaimon]

hmm...

So I'd have to start over in order to get any sort of performance gain?

I could always get a Raptor, but raid has always been a neat idea I've wanted to try.
I could raid two Raptors, but heheh... don't have the cash.

 

[Nothinman]

IMO the performance increase isn't worth the risk of RAID0.

 

[aussiestilgar]

Isn't the risk of having a RAID0 fail essentially twice that of having one of the two separate drives fail? So if in the 5 years you're going to use the HDDs for example, their risk of failure is 3% for each drive, then the RAID0 setup would be 6%. Thats not too bad, considering if one HDD fails then its gonna be a PITA either way. And that can be circumvented by having some sort of backup (DVDs or an external HDD, or even a USB flash drive). With that said, a RAID0 setup doesn't give you a HUGE performance increase, but it definitely speeds things up. I think it can be worth it, depends on personal preference really.
As for RAID controller cards for under $100, there are very few and I'm not sure how reliable they are. The recommended ones cost around $250.

 

[imported_wired247]

another point, aussie.... is that 2-disk RAID-0 is not a huge performance jump. You'd need a few more drives to really give you a kick in the performance.

 

[djplayer]

Originally posted by: wired247
another point, aussie.... is that 2-disk RAID-0 is not a huge performance jump. You'd need a few more drives to really give you a kick in the performance.

on a file sever though you would see a significant performance gain using a raptor though..

 

[agathodaimon]

I see... I probably won't mess with it then.

Thanks for the input.