hi! my motherboard supports 2 serial ATA drives it has the Promise chipset i belive, i've never set up or used a RAID array either, my question is can one use the serial drives instead of the IDE drives? i know the bandwidth gains are not that much but i'm curious as to what advantages i could get from serial VS IDE. any help or info would be great!! thanks in advance!
Yeah you can use the SATA drives instead of IDE. I currently use my onboard silicon controller to run 2 60GB Maxtors in RAID0. The biggest performance gain I can see is when moving large files around. For instance, on my other computer my ide drive can take up to a minute or two to delete a large number of files (say 20-30GB). On my SATA striped array it takes less than a second. Plus it seems to install XP a lot quicker. Other than that I can't think of any performance gain. Some bad things are you're twice as likely to have a failure as if one of your drives goes down, you lose everything. I'd just summarize and say that the only benefits are a good speed gain.
in my opinion you wont see too much of difference with one sata drive over ide . it is when you pair 2 drives in a raid + sata that you really see a performance increase especially if using 2 western digital 10000 rpm drives in a raid like myself . the problem is as stated above if i were to lose a drive i would lose all of my data on the raid . there are pro's and con's to this . i take the risk for the performance increase as i back up all of my data so it doesnt matter if i lose a drive .
