Wanting to go SATA

The 7200.9 series are Seagate's previous generation of drives, they're a fair bit slower than the newer 7200.10s but the 10s are only available from 200Gb upwards.

If you want less than that then the Hitachi 7K160s are the fastest available.
 
Ah thanks for that. So this Raid Business, which is the RAID where it reads half from 1 disc then half from other so it drops seek times by half?
 
RAID0 spreads the data across the two disks but it won't give you improved seek times, that's limited by the disks themselves. What it will give is improved sustained transfer rates.
 
Apologies for interrupting your thread, but I have question regarding SATA-II drives as well :D

Would it be possible to use this:

Hitachi Deskstar 7K160 NCQ 80GB SATA-II 8MB Cache - OEM (0A32727)

With this:

Asrock 4CoreDual-VSTA (Socket 775) PCI-Express/AGP DDR2 Motherboard

???

I looked at the specs on the Asrock and it only seems to have standard SATA-I, not SATA-II, ports.
 
SATA2 is backwards compatible with SATA1 so yes, the drive will work with that board. A lot of drives/controllers will auto-negotiate the speed but some of the older controllers can struggle so most drives will ship with a jumper limiting them to SATA1 speeds - not that there's any real difference when you take it off.

The Hitachis are a little different though, they still come defaulted to SATA1 but you need to use their Drive Feature Tool software to enable SATA2 mode. This is a bit of a pain because the DFT won't recognise the drive if it's in a RAID array.
 
Got my Hitachi Deskstar 7K160 NCQ 80GB SATA-II 8MB Cache - OEM (0A32727), and having big problems sticking them in a raid array. I do the F6 when Installing Windows Xp Pro 32bit.

Load the drivers from the floppy, but then I get this:

File nvraid.sys caused an unexpected error (4096) at line 2113 in d:\xpsprtm\base\boot\setup\oemdisk.c

Been at it for 3 hours now, what do I do? :(
 
RAID Bios? It comes up when I boot up the machine, RAID Healthy 158GB. It's just when I go to start installing RAID Drivers from floppy, that error comes up. I think the floppy maybe the culprit. And I don't have any floppy drives at home :\
 
Could be a duff floppy or corrupt files on it.

You could bypass the F6 portion of the setup by creating a new install CD including the drivers by using nLite.
 
Vita said:
Ah thanks for that. So this Raid Business, which is the RAID where it reads half from 1 disc then half from other so it drops seek times by half?
Click to expand...

Raid 1. The seek times are roughly halved because you have 2 drives with the same data looking for it at once so the chance is that you will find it faster, also both drives can transfer data at once so you get double throughput (in theory). At least thats how it works with operating systems that supports split seeks, I don't think windows does.
 
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Turned out to be a duff floppy, got everything working great. Opted for RAID 0 with a 64K Stripe. Which is faster, RAID 0 or RAID 1? I tend to browse net, download files, play games. Any recommendations?
 
Raid 0, windows doesn't allow split seeks afaik. Raid 0 has both read and write advantages, though seek times can be worse.
 
Ah cool, thanks for that. I haven't noticed windows being much faster as of yet. Going todo a Bench in a minute to see :p
 
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