My board supports this technology and I've studied it a bit, but I'd like the opinions of my fellow simmers.I'm a bit confused about the RAID options and how best to configure them. I would probably buy only one drive, but would like the option of adding a second SATA drive later. Are the new SATA drives easy to configure? How much different (and complicated) from IDE drives is the set-up of a SATA drive? Am I OK to use my on-board controller, or is an add-on card preferred?Thanks for your input.Sys specs:AMD 2400XP @ 2.1 GhzASUS A7N8X Deluxe 2.01 Gb Crucial PC2700ATI 9700 ProTurtle Beach soundMaxtor 40 Gb ATA 133Sony 52 x 24 x52 CDRW100 Mb Iomega ZipLian-Li w/ Antec 430W PSU

Maybe this will help. I my just built a new system, I have 2 Western Digital Raptor's @ 10,000 rpm, 8 MB cache each, in RAID 0. I have never seen anything this fast. Blazing fast. ______________________________________________________________________

RAID: Redundant Array of Independant Disks (or Drives depending on who you talk to) Striping: Reading/Writing data to more than one drive at once. You will never have an entire file on a single disk, it is divided up amongst all drives in the stripe. RAID0: Striping 2 Drives Minimum Array Size The only flavour of RAID that is not really RAID. Striping data to all drives in the array with no parity. Pros: High speed reading and writing. All HD space is available. Cons: No redundancy. if one drive fails, all data is lost. RAID1: Mirroring 2 Drives Minimum Array Size. Always an even number of drives in the array where half of the drives contain your data, and the other half have an exact duplicate of that data. Thus if a drive fails, the data is safe on the other half of the array, and allows the server to remain functional until the failed drive can be replaced. Pros: Full redundancy on all files, low CPU usage when rebuilding data to a replaced drive. Increased read speed. Cons: Only half of the drive space in the computer is available for use, making this a costly option. RAID3: Striping with Static Parity 3 Drives Minimum Array Size. Data is striped across drives in the array. One or more drives are dedicated to holding parity bits, which allow data from a failed drive to be mimicked. 1/3rd of the drives in a RAID3 stripe must be used to store parity information. Pros: High Speed Reading and Writing. Parity backup available to maintain server uptime while a failed drive gets replaced. Cons: Only 2/3rds of all drive space is available for use. If one more drive than your number of parity drives fails, all data is lost. RAID5: Striping with Dynamic Parity 3 Drives Minimum Array Size. Data is striped across drives in the array. Parity information is also striped across all drives. This allows you to control how much parity information you wish to store, trading disk space for redundancy, and vice versa. Pros: High Speed Reading. Parity Backup for uptime after multiple drive failure. Configurable Parity size. Cons: Low Write speed due to dynamic parity. You will also see flavours such as RAID10 (Aka RAID01) and RAID31, etc. These are combinations of other RAID types... for instance RAID10 would be Two RAID0 Stripes which are mirrored to each other... thus combining the benefeits of RAID1 and RAID0. RAID31 would be 2 RAID3 Parity Stripes which are mirrored for extra redundancy. These types typically are only combined with RAID1. What it adds is the functionality of mirroring across two controllers, allowing redundancy to not interrupt uptime, even with a Controller failure.

______________________________________________________________________Jay:-)______________________________________________________________________

SATA drives are very easy to configure for a RAID configuration. I am running 2 Seagate 120GB drives in my A7N8X Deluxe 1.4 board right now. I LOVE it. The speed of these two drives is phenomenal. You must setup the raid in the Raid Controller BIOS before you install the OS however. Do not try to create a RAID configuration in hardware with the onboard controller BIOS or you will loose the ability to boot from the MBR of the origninal drive. I run RAID 0 and it smokes on the SISOFT Sandra benchmarks. It's very nice to have 230+ GB of space in a RAID 0 config with SATA drives. AK Air...

Now for the money question... literally.How much for those drives?! I was under the impression they weren't readily available yet. (Gnashing fingers at the thought of MORE upgrading):)Greg

"SATA drives are very easy to configure for a RAID configuration. I am running 2 Seagate 120GB drives in my A7N8X Deluxe 1.4 board right now. I LOVE it. The speed of these two drives is phenomenal. You must setup the raid in the Raid Controller BIOS before you install the OS however. Do not try to create a RAID configuration in hardware with the onboard controller BIOS or you will loose the ability to boot from the MBR of the origninal drive. I run RAID 0 and it smokes on the SISOFT Sandra benchmarks. It's very nice to have 230+ GB of space in a RAID 0 config with SATA drives. "Thanks for the info everybody.One final question... do I have to set up a RAID config if I run just one SATA drive? As far as price... Newegg has a WD 36Gb Raptor for $140.00. Not a bad price considering the technology.Cheers,

I'm no specialist. Just a (old) gamer who has been on the market for a few months now and has read a lot.SATA and RAID are two different things. You can have a RAID config. without SATA.You need at least two drives to set up a RAID config. Only a few apps can really take advantage of it. You need to continously transfer a lot of data to make use of your money. You can have one S-ATA drive on a "normal" setup. It is certainly nice but no existing HD seems to be able to use its 150 Mb/s throughput. I understand that no existing HD can actually even saturate UDMA 133 or 100 for that matter either.So at this time, this is kinda waste of money.The raptor at 10000 rpm is nice but you need TWO of them to make sense. For 100 bucks you can get a nice 80 Gb with a 8 Mb oncache which is enough for games.my two

Hi Dominique,Thanks for the (simple) clarification between RAID and SATA.This point has me confused though:"The raptor at 10000 rpm is nice but you need TWO of them to make sense."I don't understand why you would need TWO to make the purchase worthwhile?Regards,

The raptor has a "small" capacity , 36.7 GB "only". My understanding is that they were designed with a RAID config in mind. But you dont actually need two. That was an overstatement from my part. It just seems to make sense to have two.Again I'm not a pro so take it with a pinch of salt.You may be interested by this site :http://www.storagereview.com/Dominique