New HD's and DVD DL burner
 

Okay, just deciding on some new hard ware.

First of all. I need a new DVD dual layer burner. Suggestions?


2nd of all. I have 2 hard drives. 1 60 gig hard drive for my OS

and a 189 gig for my storage drive.

I have a k8t motherboard from MSI and I want to add another HD and turn the 189 and the new one into a RAID.

One. my current drive is IDE, are all drives capable of raid?
Two. What type of raid? All my music and the such are on it.
Three how do i set up raid?

alot of people have been raving about this drive:

http://www.newegg.com/product/produc...82E16827152046

about Raid, I would *personally* setup a RAID 0, which increases your HD preformance by striping data across two drives (note, that if both drives are not the same, your total space will be as much as the smallest drive in your RAID.

Then I would setup the third hard drive as a backup drive, cause of eather of your RAID drives dies On a RAID 0 configuration, all data is lost in the array.

Of course, I don't know the capacity of your new drive, and 60 is kinda low for a backup drive, or the new drive, since it will probably be over 100, you'll have 50-80 gig.unuseable

You have to have a motherboard capable of RAID (looking on the MSI's website, all thier K8T's do, yay)

As for setting it up, I've never done it. So, RTFM

im talking 189 gig one as storage.

I have used raid 0 in both ide and sata... it's just a matter of playing with your mobo options and getting the right driver BEFORE you start.

the raid driver disk usually comes with your motherboard

That's always a good thing.

If you're saying that you want to use them for separate purposes, well that's not implementable with RAID. RAID combines multiple drives to make a single one, effectively. RAID 0 stripes: you theoretically get twice the speed of a single drive (real life about 1/3 gain) and the entire total of the drives' capacities, but a drop in reliability. RAID 1 mirrors: two identical copies, so it's almost as fast as a single drive with half the total of the drives' capacities, but far more reliable.
Any hard drive can be part of a RAID setup, it's not the hard drive itself that performs RAID functions but the controller. Your motherboard doesn't have an IDE RAID controller, only a SATA RAID controller. You'll have to pair SATA drives to run RAID.

NOTE: As mentioned below, just don't RAID (especially since you don't have same drives).

DO NOT USE RAID0!!! Unless you absolutely positively know you need it (this is almost certainly not your case). RAID0 does have some performance increase, but with IDE it's not so big. Further, it dramatically increases the chances of you losing all of your data for various reasons.

Besides, if you are using two different drives for RAID, the benefits of it decrease dramatically, particularly with striping. The data writes need to be synced, so any difference in the drives can really kill that syncing process and greatly the diminsh the benefits.

IMO: Just setup two drives. Raid is fun until it screws up. I had a 'functioning' radi0 array for some time with two (good) identical drives on what was considered a 'good' ATA RAID card. My entire MP3 collection was corrupted to some degree due to syncing issues that the driver failed to correct. So yea, unless you hvae a highend, hardware driven RAID card for SATA or SCSI and REALLY need RAID0 (you don't) there's no point. Especially if you are using it for storage, you won't notice. A raid0 setup w/ 2 10k raptor as an OS drive (backed up regularly, due to the failure issue that will never go away) will let you see some real performance differences. otherwise, it's a waste of time and effort. (and harddrive space if you have different drive sizes)

edit: good example of why not to do raid0: http://episteme.arstechnica.com/grou...2004094731/p/1

This is why, when I get the money, I'm going to make a Raid 0 with 2 SATA high performance drives (probably not the 10,000 rpm ones since so far i've seen them only going up to 74GB). Then I'm going to hook up a PATA drive of the same size and backup everything on the raid array to the other drive