Optimal RAID configuration

[osuman]

I plan to implement a RAID 0 array with 2 20GB disks on my system soon. My motherboard has 2 IDE channels that support this RAID level. Would putting disk 1 on IDE channel A and disk 2 on IDE channel B produce noticably better results than putting them as master and slave on the same channel? The board will support having it either way. Regardless, I'm going to have to get a PCI IDE exansion card because I plan on getting an DVD-burner when I do all this upgrading, so the faster implementation is the only concern. Any experience or pointers to a resource would be appreciated.

Thanks.

 

[dementg]

It's preferable to put each drive on its own channel. That way they can operate simultaneously, and they don't have to share bandwidth. But in practice it seems to make little difference, based on this:

http://www.tomshardware.com/howto/20010906/raid-06.html#data_transfer_diagrams

I actually looked that up thinking it showed the opposite, but I guess I remembered wrong. Apparently separating the channels doesn't matter much. With newer drives, if it became possible for 2 drives to saturate the bandwidth then it might matter more.

 

[technome]

Windows 2003, so I assume Windows XP handles the channels more efficiently than lower Windows versions. So you should have better performance having the drives on separate channels if you have XP.