Looking for performance for the new PC(getting next week).
Tempted by RAID 0, but if partitioned and used correctly I seemed to recall 2 disks un RAID'd being as quick with none of the potential drawbacks of unmirrored striping.

Any thoughts?

Obviously if you run IDE drives striped with no backups then you are asking for trouble as if 1 drive borks itself, the data is pretty well rendered toast.

However, the performance benefits vary depending on what you use it for. I have run striped drives for about 2 years now and there is no way that I personally would run non striped now. I have a server, so all important data is stored on there, whatever I have on my machine itself isn't life-threateningly important.

I had the choice of using my old 15K rpm SCSI setup or striping my IDE's a while ago and my striped setup won hands down, so I kept it . Hell I even run a pair of Deathstars striped and have yet 'cough' to have them throw a wobbly;)

I am not doing the technical pro's and cons on this thread as it wasn't aaaaal that long ago that I did one on here actually going into proper technical detail.

I do a lot of work with big zip files etc and it absolutely flies. In games like Battefield 1942, where the map changes are quite intensive loads, I am ALWAYS on the next map way before any of the other players. Hehe, good non technical examples ;)

My config:

Highpoint RocketRAID 404 4 Channel ATA133 Controller Card

2 WD800JB(8mb cache) drives, striped together
2 IBM 120GXP drives, striped together

The only thing that will beat that is Striped 10Krpm+ SCSI stuff IMO.

Cheers,

Nick :)

Cheers for the info.

Is'nt the RAID card hampered by the PCI Bus though?

Neil,

The PCI bus will be fine, your system will be so fast anyway that any bottlenecks will not be noticed.

If you really want a fast disk subsystem then there's a certain customer I know of that are disposing of an MA8000 and a bunch of fibre cards as part of a consolidation project!

Phil

LOL and the geeks come to the surface ;)

Nick - Neil and me work together and are doing a consolidation project which is causing us a lot of hassle, hence the comment around the SAN.

Who do you work for? Mail me off line if you prefer.

Why would I want to?

I do mostly large lan/wan building and management.

Storage is one of the other things that I dabble with.

Cheers,

Nick :)