Help with hard drive setup

[thermg]

Hi,

Im looking to upgrade my IDE hard drives to some faster SATA or SATA II drives. On my board I have one SATA-II port and two SATA ports that allow RAID 0, 1 and jbod i think. So, do you recommend getting two decent SATA drives to run in RAID 1 (Would use this for personal data) and running a SATA II drive for windows, or maybe getting a controller card and running SATA II for everything. Im thinking of an 80-120GB hard drive for windows and programs and either a 250 or 300GB hard drive setup for data. Thanks in advance for any views about this.

Thermg

 

[nick_lerwill]

why not just get 1 big HD?

 

[Dunky]

I wouldn't get a controller card unless you needed more than 3 drives. Don't worry if a drive / port is SATA or SATA II, there is very little if any real life difference in speed between the two. SATA can pull 150MB/sec, and SATA II approx 300MB/sec however this is the maximum of the interface - most current hard drives read at approx 55-70MB/sec. Buffered reads are faster on SATA II but this doesn't translate to much in performance terms.