On Wed, 26 Nov 2003 14:34:37 +0200, "Ari Oppenheimer"
wrote:

Hi,
I want to buy as new hard drive but have a dilemma:

I have the following options:
1) Buy 1X 160GB SATA hard drive - $130
2) Buy 2X 80GB EIDE drives and use RAID - $110
3) Buy 2X 80GB SATA hard drive and use RAID - $160

Between the first 2, does SATA go faster than EIDE RAID or does EIDE RAID go
quicker than a serial ATA solution.

Depending on which you recommend from the 1st 2, is it worth the price
difference to get the 3rd option. Its almost $50 more.

Please advise on which of the above I should look into, or, if you have more
recommendations, please let me know.

Thank you



What's important to you?
Performance, reliability, storage capacity, backward compatibility,
price? Of course you can't have the best of all of those choices so
your particular preferences and intended storage and system usage must
be considered. The following isnt' an all-inclusive overview but just
a few thoughts:

#3 is fastest but unless you have another board with same SATA RAID
controller, it's not backwards compatible or particularly reliable,
being a RAID 0.

#2 is slower than #3, could be faster or slower than #1 depending on
the exact drives and how much you use the PCI bus for other devices...
It's best to avoid placing drives on a PCI bus based controller when
utmost performance is desired.

#1 is most reliable by doing without the RAID 0, most compatible with
another system should your motherboard fail, though PATA would be even
moreso. It's a good standard configuration but for some uses you'd
benefit from having a 2nd drive for backup purposes or greater
performance... some tasks benefit more from 2 independant drives than
the same two drives in a RAID 0 array... for example video editing
source/destination or pagefile location if the machine has too little
memory.



Dave