RAID or not to RAID

[deeem]

Hi guys,

I currently have a maxtor 160gb SATA2 drive sitting in my machine and wondered whether I should get another one and raid them to (0)?. Is it a good idea or not?

Also what are the performance gains involved as I will be finally moving from XP to Vista 64bit.

And the last question... How do I set it up?

Thanks in advance.

Damon

 

[deeem]

thanks for the replies... I will take a look at the article now.

Damon

 

[deeem]

Aside from the performance question there are other issues which you need to think about:

1) Can you get another matching disk? Maxtors are increasingly difficult to locate and while you can run mismatched drives in a RAID0 array it's not the optimum solution
2) Does your existing board support RAID? If it doesn't then you're stuck before you start
3) You will have to reinstall everything because creating the array wipes both drives. Do you have backups or the ability to take them to another storage medium?

1. If necessary I would probably end up buy 2 new matching drives as they are quite cheap nowadays.

2. Yeah I have just upgraded my machine so my board does support the following (which I know nothing about): SATA1-6 RAID 0/1/0+1/5 or JBOD.

3. I will be starting from scratch anyway as I have just changed motherboards and would like to try vista out.

Thanks for the advice.

Damon