im looking for a mobo and im stuck between two intel boards. the only differences is one has sata raid and an optical output for sound. If these differences wont benefit me then i will go with the cheaper board, but i dont exactly know what raid is. please help. any response will be appreciated. thanks - Jared
RAID is when you use 2 or more hard drives in either a striped or mirrored configuration. Not to be a smartass, but you could have googled the term as well you know. Basically, if you're not using multiple hard drives, don't worry about it. Do you have an ATA or SATA drive?
Junit, check this out: http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/R/RAID.html Go for it; one day when you gain more knowledge and want more speed (striping) or backup of hard drive (mirroring with fault tolerance), then you can configure via the bios the RAID settings you want to use. Like Ratbastid said, you will need two SATA hard drives at a miniumum to use RAID technology. Good luck. Let us know.
currently i have a sata II 250g drive but im thinking about getting a 10,000rpm drive soon. so you would recommend looking into raid then? thanks for the help.
Well if you're spending the money to get a 10k rpm drive and want to raid, then get TWO of them, use that as the stripe array, and the 250 gb drive as your storage. Raiding a 10k rpm drive to a 7200 one is a waste, you'd be further ahead to just get another 250 7200. Make sense?
i think so. Pretty much the 10k would be limited to 7.2k in raid right? the 7200 would be a weak link is what im getting at. the mobo has a couple different raid options. i read a couple of the dif. stages on webopedia but which would be most benefical for home/office use. Some of the options were for servers i think.
Well, for most home users, raid 0, 1, or 0+1 are your main options. RAID 5 is great, but you need at least 3 drives, and only have a percentage of the drive available to you...but I digress. RAID 0 is for redundancy and data security, RAID 1 is for performance. If you have 4 drives, you can mirror a striped array, and you get the benefits of both. Downside is you paid for 4 drives. Most decent mobo's these days have 4 SATA connectors, so having a striped array for your O/S and programs and a single drive (either SATA or PATA) is a pretty good system for performance and reliability. As for the 10k being slowed down, yeah. I never tried to stripe drives of different speeds before. Different brands and sizes is fine, you'll just be limited by the size of the smaller one. If you just want to stick with the two drives, put your OS and programs on the 10k and use the 250 for storage, it's still pretty fast. I striped a pair of 120 gb Western Digital SATA drives (7200 rpm) and didn't really see much difference in the real world. A little, but not enough to justify the cost of buying TWO 10k Raptors. At least, not until the price comes down on them. $400 and you only have 150gb? That's not so hot these days.
