Need fast Harddrive for RAID

Well I need a few fast harddrives for RAID But I have never done it before so I need some advice:
What size is good?
Any perticular make good?

• How many HDD are best?
• What size is good?
• Any perticular make good?
• Is the Onboard RAID good enough or do I need a card? If so, which one is good?
• Anything Else you think I need to know

I don't want to spend Loads of money on it, but I may be able to spend a couple of hundred Pounds, I don't know if this is enough, but as I'm upgrading the rest of my computer aswell, It's going to be expensive.

Are you considering a RAID0 or RAID1 set up ..... what is your reason for wanting RAID ?

There are a few routes to take if you want the ultimate hard drive speed.

The most common would be to take an average hard drive, for example the slightly speedy 500gb samsung spinpoint, and simply put several of them in RAID0.

More speed-orientated enthusiasts however would be looking at the Western Digital Raptor X series, which offer a spindle speed of 10,000RPM, an improvement over the standard 7,200RPM and come in 36gb, 74gb and 150gb sizes. I currently have 2 x 36GB Raptors in RAID0, and it's pretty fast.

Although if you are hellbent on having simply the fastest system out there, you may want to look at SSDs (Solid State Disks), of which the most common is the Samsung 32GB disks. These have an oustanding read speed of 50mb/s, though their write speed suffers as a consequence. These are actually memory cards, but can be used as hard drives, and are not for the feint hearted, or even the shallow pocketed, as these can be anywhere from £200 EACH.

Onboard RAID is good enough, if your chipset supports it, though there isn't any real advantages/disadvantages to using a RAID Card.

Well I need a fast hdd setup, but I am unfamiliar with RAID, so, Whats the Difference between RAID0 and RAID1?

Have a look here this should explain things for you.

Ok, from reading that I think I want RAID0

After looking at some HDD I think I want to go for 4 drives @ about 160GB each @ 7200RPM, this should limit the cost somewhat, however provide good preformance, however I am still looking for a RAID card that supports 4 drives, not 100% sure I wil need a card, but from reviews i have read on some, it does speed the proccess up. Please let me know if I am making a terrible mistake :P

before i was looking at this Motherboard, it says in the specifications: Storage: Serial ATA-300 (RAID) but I cannot find any info aout the raid on the asustek website, so anyone have any ideas about it's RAID capabilities?

Motherboard should be fine then.

Do all motherboard support RAID for all the SATA connections?
For example, I'm wanting to RAID 4 drives in RAID0 Would the drive support all 4 SATA ports in RAID? I was also thinking of a RAID card so I can have my current 2 harddrives to store stuff that I need to keep, just incase of a RAID drive failure, Or is it best to get a SATA card, just for an extra 2 ports, and use the onboard RAID?

Hope that makes sence, if it doesn't say which part and I'll try to re type it comprehensivley

I don't know, you'd have to ask someone that has experience with RAID. I assume that the on-board will work fine, but I wouldn't bet on it.

It depends which board. If the chipset supports RAID then all the sata ports that the chipset controls will support RAID. The board i'm looking at however has 2 extra SATA ports that are controlled by a seperate chip and do not support RAID.

I'm not quite sure what you mean here.

Basically my set up includes 2 HDDs in RAID0 which are my primary drives, used for general applications and gaming. I also have a 200gb back-up drive which I store all my documents and such on, to keep the RAID drives clear of clutter.

I do not use a RAID card as I don't really see there being much of a performance increase for the extra money you are paying, my on-board RAID works just fine.

EDIT: Just looking at your previous post, wanting 4x160gb drives in RAID0 is pretty much stabbing yourself in the back. RAID0 has a zero-fault tolerance, which means, anything messes up, its ****ed permanently. Having 640gb's worth of hard drive space in a RAID0 array would either mean your wasting a heck of a lot of space if you're not using it to store documents, but if you are wanting to store stuff on it, you're taking a huge risk as it could all be lost if something happens to any one of your hard drives.

RAID0 is usually smaller in capacity, as it is based on performance rather than reliability, and RAID1 tends to be biased more towards reliability.

To Carbon's post: Thanks, but I may need more SATA ports anyway so I might go with a RAID card even though my motherboard handles it

To Gazmondo's post: Do you therefore think I should go with 4x80gb? or even small, i would save game files and OS files on it, and mybe use my current 2 drives (250Gb and 120Gb) to store all the extra stuff that doesn't need fast performance? And if 1 drive in a RAID fails, are the other drives still usable, just i lose all the data, or if 1 drive fails, do all?

Can people reading thins thread also take a look at this thread of mine on a similar topic.

Thanks

Err..may I ask, how does this work? I mean, all the HDD stuff is through the southbridge, sure, but channeling a 3.0mbps SATA connection through a PCI slot is going to result in some massive slowdowns.