Building a PC, RAID questions.

jomandoor

jomandoor

jomandoor

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Joined
26 Mar 2008
Posts
17
Hi there,

I am thinking of building a new PC, My initial plan was to get:

XFX nForce 790i Ultra SLI (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR3 Motherboard

2x Maxtor Diamondmax 22 500GB SATA-II 32MB Cache - OEM

2x Western Digital Raptor 150GB 10000RPM SATA 16MB Cache - OEM

I wanted to use the Raptors as a programs/games drive in RAID-0
But I also need a lot of space for work so but I don't want to compromise on speed. If I go RAID-0 for my main drive why not for the work drive, after all I will be handling individual files of several hundred mb each.

But I am new to this and was wondering what your views where? I also have another 500gb external drive that I would do backups onto from my work drive (the two Maxtor's) as I know there is an increased chance of failure with RAID-0, but what is the likelihood of that?

Also can I have two RAID setups on one PC like that? I can't find any info on it.

Thanks!

P.S I was also about to buy 2x OCZ 4GB DDR3 PC3-10666C6 1333MHz ReaperX (2x2GB) Dual Channel DDR3 But I read that they wont fit side by side so I could only go 4GB, what other ram would you recommend (DDR3)? That had the lowest timings but I really don't understand them so I just went with it. I don't mind 4GB, more is just because I can, but I would like to be able to upgrade without changing all the ram.
 
There's no problem running multiple arrays from the one controller.

What are you doing on the work drive? If it involves simultaneous reads and writes then you'll probably be better leaving the two drives separate and reading from one while writing to the other.
 
Now you say controller? Is that the motherboard one, or would I need to buy a RAID pci card? Sorry I am pretty ignorant when it comes to this.

As for the work drive it would be audio/visual design work, photoshop and audition mainly but with some XSI
 
I mean the motherboard one.

Sounds like what you're doing isn't going to involve a lot of I/O contention so you might see better performance with the Maxtors in RAID0 but it's an inexact science.
 
RAID1 is not a backup

All RAID1 provides is hardware redundancy in the event of a disk failure, there are plenty of failure scenarios which RAID1 will not protect you from whereas a backup will. RAID1 performance also tends to be less than that of a single drive.
 
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