RAID Array's

[Steve Watford]

Ok, so I have one 250GB (SATA) Seagate HD and one 120GB (IDE) Western Digital Hard Drive. I was wondering if;

I am not atall educated on anything atall marginal to do with RAID, so bare with me on this. Is it possible to RAID array both of these drives? Given that that one is IDE and other SATA? And would I gain any performance boost from doing this? My motherboard supports RAID, jsut not sure if IDE and SATA will work together.

 

[rpstewart]

Creating a RAID array of two drives that different isn't a good idea. Even if your mobo supported RAID across SATA and IDE (most don't) you'd lose half of the capacity of the 250Gb drive. Any potential performance gain is difficult to estimate simply because I don't know of anyone who has done this and so I don't have a benchmark figure to give you.

Given the potential pitfalls I would suggest that you leave them as separate drives and look at whether you can rearrange things on the disks to give you the best performance. Think about booting off the SATA disk as it's likely to be the quicker of the two, partitioning it to ensure windows is at the outside (faster part) of the disk is also an option. Putting the swap file on a different physical disk can also make a small improvement in performance.