helmcj

CompUSA has had a couple of sales now on 160GB ATA-100 hard drives with 8MB caches. Twice in the past they have had the Western Digital drives on sale for $39.99 after rebates and now they have Seagate drives (which I believe have a better warranty) on sale for $39.99 after rebates.

My understanding is that the physical devices that store/read/write is the same in all hard drives whether ATA-100, ATA-133, SATA, SATA-150, SATAII, etc.

My understanding is also that using RAID 0 (striping) effectively allows 2 or more drives to operate in parallel which (in theory) should allow them to operate more quickly than a single drive of the same total size.

I have been looking at RAID controllers but I am having a hard time figuring out what to purchase.

My current PC is an "old" Dell Dimension XPX B__r with a P3 733MHz processor and 512MB RAM.

I know that Windows XP supports RAID ... but from what I have read it relies on the CPU and ... well ... we are taking about a P3 @ 733MHz here so I have ruled that option out.

When this is replaced it is my intention to build a PC myself from components. Many new motherboards appear to support 4-8 SATA hard drives and some include RAID chipsets.

It also seems like there are very few ATA-100 RAID controllers out there. There are some ATA-133 RAID controllers which should be backwards compatible with ATA-100.

It almost seems like some of the SATA RAID controllers are cheaper than the ATA-133 RAID controllers.

I am wondering if it would make sense to buy SATA-to-IDE/ATA-133/100 adapters for each of the drives and then buy a SATA RAID controller rather that an ATA-133 RAID controller?

This would make it easier to re-use the drive in the next PC which will certainly support at least 4 SATA drives and probably include a RAID chipset on the motherboard.

It would also make the cabling much easier.

The one factor that I am having the most difficulty with is understanding the impact of the bus.

Some RAID controllers support PCI 32 bit / 33 MHz; others support PCI 64 bit / 66MHz; some appear to support both.

I know that my current machine only supports PCI 32 bit / 33 MHz.

I think I have painted a picture of what am trying to do.

Any suggestions and specific hardware recommendations would be appreciated.

Also ... how does one typically back up a RAID system?

Is there a way to copy all the drives to another set of drives (like a set of external USB drives) in their entirety?

Here is a really dumb question: could you set up RAID 0 using only external USB drives under Windows XP Pro?

I am assuming that the answer is no and that in any case this would not make sense as the USB interface would slow things down too much?

One other thing ... I know that my current machine only has a 200W power supply so I will likely need to add some kind of supplimental power supply.

Worst case: I will buy enclosure + USB 2.0 adapter kits for the drives (for less than $40) and then give them away as Christmas presents or something.

crazijoe

The first this is you must realize the performance of the PCI bus. This is your biggest bottleneck. Theoretical max bandwidth of the 32 bit PCI bus is 133MB/sec. Now the RAID array will saturate that. You must also take into consideration the other items that run off the PCI bus such as LAN, audio, etc.
IDE is a dying breed. Much like ISA slots on older motherboards. Even optical drive are starting to use SATA.
You will not see performance form a USB slot. USB speeds are only 480Mb/sec (thats bits, not bytes)

40 bones is a good price for 160GB drives. But my advice, save your pennies for newer technology.

If you doo decide on more drives in your system, get a bigger PSU. Do not buy cheap. Get a name brand like Enermax or Antec.