[Carbon]

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.

[Gazmondo]

Originally Posted by thingie2

Do all motherboard support RAID for all the SATA connections?

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.

Originally Posted by thingie2

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?

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.

[thingie2]

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?

[thingie2]

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

Thanks

[Carbon]

Originally Posted by thingie2

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

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.

[thingie2]

It is run through PCIE slots, either PCIEx1 for 2 drives or PCIEx4 or PCI-X for 4 drives from the ones I have seen so far, so the speeds are possible, but I think I'm just going to stick with onboard now that i have found a board that can raid 4 cards with onboard, and still have ports spare (it's this one)

[Gazmondo]

It seems as though you are stuck on having 4 hard drives in this array. RAID0 can accept 2 drives and I would recommend using just two, these being 36gb raptors, which can be picked up pretty cheaply on ebay now.RAID0 - any hdd fails then you lose ALL data on ALL drives in that array.RAID1 - any hdd fails then you CAN recover data from the other.

[thingie2]

Ok, well i took a look at raptors on Ebay, whats the difference between the raptors and the Raptor X? and I noticed they only have transfer rates of 150Mb/s is this noticable rarther than 300Mb/s?

[thingie2]

And I was going to get 4 of these drives for the RAID but would it be faster to get 2 raptors?

[Gazmondo]

1. You do not need (and I wouldn't recommend) using 4 hard drives for RAID0.

2. That WD hard drive you've seen is not a performance-driven hard drive. Stick with the 10k RPM drives.

3. No hard drive has a transfer rate of 150mb/s. I know it sounds confusing, but the fastest a raptor can do is around 133mb/s, which is the fastest any hard drive can do. Can't remember where I read this from, it will be in one my my CustomPC Magazines somewhere.

4. Finally ... I'm not putting you off RAID mate but you seem to be going the wrong way about it - Using 4 x 160gb drives for RAID0 has about as much common sense behind it as using a wet sponge to defend yourself from a speeding camel.

4 x 160gb would give you 640gb of space, which, as I said in my previous post, is ridiculous for a RAID0 array. You would only use that much space to store documents on in a RAID1 array where everything is backed up in each drive. RAID0 is PURELY for performance, because you CANNOT recover ANYTHING if just a single hard drive fails! This basically means you want to use the fastest hard drives you can for RAID0 and completely ignore the size issue, because it is irrelevant. Stick with getting 2 raptors and running them both in RAID0 with each other, and saving your documents onto a secondary hard drive, for example one of those 160gb drives you linked to.