Hi

Im currently building a new pc (from a barebones system)

it is a xpc shuttle ST20G5

Ive an athlon 64 3000+

2Gb DDR400 ram

now here is my mini dilema

one SATA maxtor diamond plus 9 120gb

or two using raid 0 (Just want performance)

i want somthing fast for games etc

if i stick two hard drives i have to lose the floppy drive that is behind one of the covers

i dont mind not having the floppy as i hardley use it but i dont know if the raid setup is rely worth it as i have never used a pc setup with it other than the works server

is there much of a difference using raid over just installing a single sata had drive without raid

i cant make my mind up what to do now :banghead:

anybody got any words of wisdom

I have a couple of IBM/Hitachi 160GB SATA drives running on my nforce4 ultra mobo using the nvidia raid option and I have to say it's pretty darn quick.

I have a third identical drive (albeit 250GB) as storage on a third SATA connector running on its own and it isn't as quick.

I'd say it's worth it, but if that's all going in a shuttle, I'd think a bit about heat. I've had nothing but a chain of disasters with recent maxtor DM9 drives (albeit PATA not SATA) and wondered if it was due to heat - had an older less-well ventilated case then and they consistently failed on me.

edit: if you want the shuttle to be a games machine, you're gonna have a pretty decent gpu and the amd64 will be chucking out some heat, so think about it.

Having two drives as raid-0 seems a little too risky for me. You only need a problem on one to lose everything. Ok if you have good backups but how many people are as careful at home as they should be?

mmmm

ill admit i didnt tink about heat

i built an almost identical spec pc with just the one sata disk

for sombody at work

and it was fine cant make my mind up if SATA is worth it for what i want

most of the time it will just be an internet,media,office machine (the main PC)

but i want to get half-life 2

has an ATI 2000 express onboard so i will be using that at first

dont know if i will get away with that though

Whats performance like between

Raid 0

Raid 1

a single SATA

and a standard ATA jobbie (as a benchmark)

Raid 0 is the fastest. but most probability of failing (if one drive dies, you loose all the data)

Raid 1 is the safest - no performance benfit but you will only have capacity equal to the smallest drive. but if one drive fails, you dont loose any data.

as for a single sata or pata drive.. theres no real performance benifit between the two, (maybe slight on the lastest sataII drives)

depends what you want really. raid0 is only really a benifit for powerful machines.. and in cases can actually slow down slower machines (my SIL3112 controller on my nforce2 mobo actually uses the cpu to do all the calculations.. so alot of the benifit is wiped out)

are SATA's more prone to packing up or something

i dont think ive ever had a hard drive pack up at home (toutchwood icon)

used to have loads go at work

all maxtor 40Gb though so dont know if that was a bad bunch

is raid 0 a bit faster is is it a real noticable differance to PATA

Im ok backing up so but make even more of an effort with raid o

think it will either be two disks on a raid 0 or just the one SATA no raid

seing as it is in a shuttle

if i was using a full size case i might do things differant

I have a single SATA without RAID and it goes fine for my games machine. RAID seemed overcomplicated for me for what it'd be used for. I still have room for 6 more drives, so as I progress I may think of RAID, but for the 120GB I have single SATA is fine...

are SATA's more prone to packing up or something

i dont think ive ever had a hard drive pack up at home (toutchwood icon)

used to have loads go at work

all maxtor 40Gb though so dont know if that was a bad bunch

is raid 0 a bit faster is is it a real noticable differance to PATA

Im ok backing up so but make even more of an effort with raid o

think it will either be two disks on a raid 0 or just the one SATA no raid

seing as it is in a shuttle

if i was using a full size case i might do things differant

satas are generally slightly faster, but the main attraction is the ease of cabling. etc.

if i were you id buy a raptor (very fast drive) to put your games and o/s on and then another bigger drive to store all your other data on.