Spec me a new Mb + RAID Ques

[yan]

Looking at upgrading from an athlon XP2600 (DFI nf2 Ultra infinity) to an AM2 64 or could be an intel I suppose. The pc is just used for general purpose stuff, so a quick pc is handy but is probably not going to be overclocked.. Needs to be uATX and have built in VGA and sound might be useful..

Would an Abit AN-M2/NF630a or an MSI K9MM-V be any good?

Also can someone explain the basic reasons way SATA is supposed to be so good at covering for h/w failures? From what I can see it only covers for a hd failures. I have used the above system with raid1(mirror) for 3yrs, using twin 120Gb hd's. Now the mb has failed with a corrupt bios, I'm pretty stuffed as although the hds are fine DFI tell me they will not run with the raid sw on new mb's (DFI or not). It uses SataRaid, not sure what version...

Cheers

 

[Hades]

I can't really help with a motherboard suggestion but I'd be looking at an Intel E2140/60/80 for a budget CPU upgrade. It will be waaaaaaaaaaaay faster than the XP.

SATA isn't necessarily any better at covering hardware failures. The advantages of SATA over IDE are that it is theorhetically faster and is hot swappable (and has smaller neater cables!). Personally if I used RAID (whihc I did in the past) then I'd be looking to use a RAID card and not the onboard RAID. The reason for this is that unless the new motherboard has the same RAID controller onboard then you need to rebuild the array, thereby deleting all data on the drives. A RAID card (either PCI or PCIe) would prevent this happening as you'd only need to plug the card and drivs into the new motherboard and you're all done.

 

[yan]

Ok thanks for that, hadnt thought of a raid card and this would get around a mb failure. Can you recommend one?

 

[Hades]

Sorry it's been a long time since I used RAID so anything I suggest would be a guess. But generally speaking the more you spend the better - but even a fairly basic card is probably as good as the cheap onboard versions.

 

[yan]

ok thanks...