Hard Drive Choices

**Bing Fung** · 12 November 2001, 04:09 Monday

Trev,

Nothing wrong with staying with the Quantums if your happy with them.

The IBM's are good but stay away from the 75 GXP's, those have had a very high failure rate and I believe are being recalled.

The Maxtor ATA 133 is a nice drive, The KG7 doesn't officially support ATA 133. There may be a bios upgrade at some point that will allow ATA 133, but I'm not sure. I have downloaded the new VIA XP IDE controller program that allows support for ATA 133, however it is more a patch program rather than true support. At this time I think the Highpoint HTP372 RAID controller is required for ATA133. I wouldn't get too hung up on it as ATA 100 is a stretch, for most modern systems seldom attain that transfer speed.

Remember if you want to RAID stripe your system, you should use the same size and type of drives for the best performance. Understand though that RAID Striping adds complexity and depending on the chosen Mode, 1 or 0. Mode 0 can cause a total loss of data if you lose a drive. If you aren't going to RAID stripe then just buy what every fit's your fancy.

Bing

**Trevor Schell** · 12 November 2001, 11:39 Monday

Thanks Bing!,

What are the advantages of Raid besides
losing your data.?

I think I will keep to my Quantums..

Trevor
My HomeTheater S.E.
Sonically Enhanced
C5

**Bing Fung** · 12 November 2001, 14:09 Monday

What are the advantages of Raid besides
losing your data.?

Heheh, very funny

The Raid controller on the ABIT boards allow you to run RAID 0, 1 or 0+1.

RAID 0: Requires 2 drives, the advantage here is increased performance because your 2 hard drives act as one drive writing data to to both simultainiously. The performance gain can be very impressive depending on the configuration, however your data is not very secure using this mode. One HD failure means a loss of all your data, and I can't imagine how much it would cost to restore your data or if at all possible. Corrupt transfers can also create broken stripes, which also means a loss of data if the stripe cannot be fixed. This is what happened to me

The upside of this mode is if you are using 2 40Gb drives, you get 80Gb total storage.

RAID 1: Requires 2 drives. This is more commonly known as a Mirror stripe and is more true to one of the main purposes of RAID, by providing a redundant drive which data is mirrored or duplicated on to the second drive. The advantage is your data is secure with the mirrored drive. The disadvantage is that it does not provide any performance benefit and requires 2 drives that will only equal 1 drives storage capacity, in essence you only have 40Gb storage using 2 40Gb drives.

RAID 0+1 Requires 4 drives. This is the best of both worlds, as it provides striping (performance) and Mirroring (Data integrity). Only disadvantage here is it requires 4 drives and only gives you half the storage capacity of the drives totaled just like in RAID 1. Another non-tangible may be that this mode could make a person think they are invincible, becoming lax on the routine backups

Note, all the above modes take CPU cycles to run, however the penalty can be considered a tradeoff depending on what applications you are running. As well, they add a certain amount of complexity to system management, and may trip you up when you least expect it, until you become familar with the conventions used with RAID Operations.

Sometimes a person has to lose data to learn

Hope that helps.

Bing

**Trevor Schell** · 12 November 2001, 20:47 Monday

Thanks Bing!,

I will print this off for reference.
I ordered two of the Quantums 60GB.
When I set up the new computer, I will
then decide on what to do. With the two drives
I will have options anyways.
Four drives would be nice. If you did have a HD crash at least you would have back-up.

Trevor
My HomeTheater S.E.
Sonically Enhanced
C5

Hard Drive Choices

Hard Drive Choices

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