going SATA question

BlackSabbathBlackSabbath
edited January 2006 in Hardware
Okay, so I am planning on purchasing one SATA drive for my rig. Now I only have used IDE, so I don't know what to really do to set it up, I am only talking one drive for now because of limited funds... Would I need two drives? What is this about raid 0, it requires two drives, yes? Also, would the space, if you have two drives be used in raid 0, what about in raid 1? Moreover, I would like to know the likelyhood of failure in Raid 0 compared to IDE. I have a DFi nForce 4 Lanparty motherboard.

Comments

  • profdlpprofdlp The Holy City Of Westlake, Ohio
    edited January 2006
    RAID-0 requires two drives. The way it works is that half the data is written to one drive, half to the other. The data is broken down into small chunks and "striped" across each drive. Think of it as if you took a book and cut out every other word and pasted them (in order) in a different book. Each hard drive would hold one "books" worth.

    Now, imagine that you could read one book with your left eye and the other book with your right eye at the same time. You'd be able to finish the entire volume twice as fast. The performance increase with RAID-0 works the same way; each drive is supplying data simultaneously.

    The drawback is that if one drive fails you lose all the data on both. Imagine your two books again - without one the other is useless.

    RAID-1 is where each drive contains the exact same data. It is often referred to as "mirroring". You get no performance increase at all but since you always have an exact copy of everything you are covered should either one of the drives fail.

    As far as space is concerned, two 100GB drives in RAID-0 would show up as one mammoth 200GB drive. In RAID-1 you would need two 100GB drives to cover one 100GB partition, since the second one is an exact copy of the first.

    Setting up a single SATA drive is relatively simple as long as your MB supports it and you have the proper drivers. Even with a single disk you'll likely see a performance benefit over IDE, thanks to SATA's higher throughput.
  • BlackSabbathBlackSabbath
    edited January 2006
    Thanks for clearing things up, might save up more for two SATA drives.
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