I used to use IDE raid a few years ago and a little bit more recently, 2x 4gb in a strip as my boot drive, then more recently 2x 8gb in a strip, and also mirrored for a while when I was doing important Uni. work.
When striped it was quicker than just a single drive, but it also let you do more, e.g. when something disk intensive is going on, you could still carry on using the computer normally. I find with single drives that once something is reading and writing to a drive you cant really use it until its finished.
With a mirror it is faster reading than a single drive, but it is the same speed when writing, my be a little slower, but not much.
The controller I used to use was a HPT370 with a drive on each channel.
I used the raid as my system/boot drive, all my other data was on a different drive.
The only raid I have had fail is when I took it out of my machine and tried to put it in my brothers machine so we could transfer some files, but his controller, which was the same make as mine, just killed it.
Also before I got the hardware controller (I say that loosely as the HPT controllers are not fully hardware) I used windows software raid with dynamic disks. It worked but I didn’t see much benefit from it as I wasn’t booting from it, but I did put a few games on to it to help with load times.
So if you are looking to make you system respond a little better I would say do a hardware strip raid and boot from it and keep all your data on a different drive.
If you want data security then boot from a single drive and make a mirror raid to keep your data on, this could be software or hardware, hardware being the quicker.
The only problem with a mirror raid is that you loose the space from and entire drive. With a strip of 2x13gb = 26gb of space, but a mirror of 2x13gb will only give 13gb of space.
If I understand correctly I would need two drives that match to mirror and if I stripe I guess it doesn’t matter
For any raid you are better off with drives that match.
If they don’t match it will use the size of the smallest drive.
E.g. 10gb and 13gb in strip would give 20gb space, 10gb and 13g in mirror would give 10gb.
David
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