80gb and 160gb or RAID 80gb and 80gb? Same price which better idea??

[touregg]

I have an 80gb WD 8mb cache 8.9ms HD right now, in my server. I want more. The 80gb is about 2 years old i belive. I've seen another one for $34.99 after rebate and i could get a raid card for $16.99. Same hard drive just new.
OR i saw a 160gb segate with 8mb cache 8.5ms for $50 after rebate. which i could just add to the 80gb still have two hard drives now with 50% more space but no raid.
about same price
80GB more vs RAID
(I would run striping by the way)

Which is a better idea, how much faster would the raid be considering both of these hardrives are ata100 and are going in a 1600+ AMD with 1gb of ram. which needs to run xp and fedora core 2 (so i would need to have two partions, would like to have three. for both setups)

 

[tf1]

RAID0 (stripping) will double your storage and IF you have a good RAID card, may almost double the read/write speed. However, life is NEVER that simple, budget RAID cards rarely live up to their promise, so you may double the storage, but the performance boost may be disappointing.

On the downside, you more than double the propsects of losing all your data: 2 x HDD plus a RAID controller waiting to pack in.

RAID1 (mirroring) does nothing for your storage but provides some improvement in resilience (the system should continue to operate even if one disk fails) though some of this is off-balanced by the increased risks of a controller failure. With a good RAID controller you get increased read/write performance because different data can be read simultaneously from the disks and smart caching can be used to delay writes (at least to one disk) whilst the controller is busy reading.

But again, a budget controller will probably not be able to do this well and the actual performance boost may be impercetible.

I would be very surprised if a $16.99 RAID controller does much more than simple software RAID.



Regards: tf1

 

[touregg]

I understand the concepts of raid but that is a good note about the cheap raid card. One thing that i didn't know if that raid1 could provide simultaneous data from the disks. Thats interesting. Also my sever if mainly for learning purposes for database development and a game server (hence the installation of xp)
Usally when i have game partys people copy updates for the games from my server so we are all on the same page. I figured may be having raid 0 would help with that and the speed of mysql. But you answered my question right on with the fact that the boost may be disappointing. What would you consider a good price for a good raid card???
Or would you not even consider doing raid with regular ata drives? Is it really only worth it for SCSI and SATA?

 

[tf1]

A good RAID card should have ample cache (for delaying writes whilst busy reading) and should have well written algorithms in firmware with its own processor to control this (it should not rely on the system to provide processing power).

Unfortunately, I am unable to help you with IDE ot SATA RAID controllers as I mainly deal with servers and SCSI controllers. But I am sure there are others on here that will have some experience and advice.

Adaptec Server SCSI controllers are excellent and I would suggest that you check out their SATA RAID controllers.



Regards: tf1

 

[touregg]

Will do. although a tight pocket book may have me sticking the the 160gb drive instead. Although i have a sata drive in my main system and in the future i may go the raid route.
Thanks for your help.