RAID on motherboards, what good is it? [Archive] - ForumsHQ

[Necrosaro420]

Im thinking of purchasing the P4C800-DELUXE ASUS motherboard. It has the dual raid, serial ata ect ect. I was just wondering, , what is the point in the raid stuff? Can I run my hard drives from it to make it faster? Does it work like a regular ide cable ect ect or whatever?

[Reckless]

Most Raid levels can only be run on 2 or more hard drives and it's main function is data redundancy.

[Aragon]

I only know basic RAID stuff, but there are 2 functions of RAID.



Data redundancy and speed. Minimum, you need 2 harddrives. You can set it up for redudancy: every time you write to one drive, you write to the other. This would mean your total space is the amount 1 drive holds.



You can also set it up for speed. Data would be written in a "striped" fashion to both drives. If one fails, your data is gone. Your total space is the total space of the 2 drives added together. You have a 2x chance of failure (since you have 2 drives now)



Then you can do a combination of the 2. That involves, of course, more drives.

[Raybdbomb]

you don't need it necro, just get CD's and backup your stuff on there. it's not worth the risk of losing everything on the 'speed' type raid, dunno the number of it off the top of my head...



and it's definitely not worth the money =\...



unLESS of course you're running a server, then you'd definitely want the redundancy type

[Reckless]

Aragon is correct, except if you have 3 drives and use Raid level 5 your data is more safe. If one of your drives fail, it can be recreated from the other two drives. Due to the fact that it spreads the info out over all 3 drives. Unless you are running a website where data is saved frequently, you don't need to run a RAID system.

[apathy]

Check out http://www.acnc.com/04_01_00.html for a list of all the different kinds of RAID levels (you won't be able to do them all with basic mobo RAID controllers)



But basically, if you don't know what RAID is, you won't have a decent use for it :)

[Necrosaro420]

Shrug, I never got into raid stuff, so its kinda confusing me. Anyways, here is the motherboard im getting http://www.motherboards.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=20967&&PHPSESSID=5bcee82d44fb487efb7d23996284cdfd would it be good for gaming? And will it accept 2 IDE hard drives and 2 cd drives like a normal PC w/o the raid shit? =-)

[Reckless]

that board has 2 ultra ata 133 ports, so you could have 2 hard drives. If gaming is all you'll be doing with this computer, I think you're insane. You could get high performance out of a much cheaper AMD XP cpu w/ a shuttle ak32n (think that's the latest version) for a lot cheaper.



As for the raid levels, the board supports 0, 1, and 10. 10 wouldn't be available with just 2 hard drives. 1 is the most inefficient of all raid levels so performance wouldn't be increased. Raid 0 doesn't offer any redundancy, which is the main purpose of Raid.

[Necrosaro420]

Its pretty much the only board I can find that has the 875 intel chips with 8x agp and serial ata. What board would you suggest for gaming that has 8x agp, supports p4 800mhz fsb, ata133, ddr400? =) Just for gaming. Ive found the board i listed above for 180 retail box new