new hard drive needed, suggestions?

[bdog]

I am going to be getting a new hd soon. I have decided on an IBM 7200 rpm ata66 drive. I currently am using 6 gigs of space on my current hd. My mobo will support ata66. It is a soyo 6vba133. I can either afford two 9 giggers and a promise card for a raid array or a single 27 gigger. Which would you recommend? Obviously the more space I get the better, but I want fast performance primarily. Is the raid setup that much faster than standard ata66?

[Bleeding Edge]

Yeah.

Do the RAID.

/forum/wink.gif

[bdog]

Thanks for the reply Bleeding Edge but I was pricing the wrong promise card, the fasttrack66 which I would need is approx $120, and the second drive is approx $120. Auto Backup of data(mirroring) isn't that important to me, as I regularly back up important files anyway, I am only interested in speed increase. I am going to order tommorrow, so is the RAID speed boost worth $240????

[Bleeding Edge]

Yes. It is worth it.

But it isn't even a $240 difference. If the 27G drive is around $250, the cost of the two smaller drives and the Raid card is $360 (at $120 each), the $110 price/performance difference is certainly worth it. You get double the performance.

If, at a later time, you add another two drives when the price comes down (yes, they're very affordable now), you can get triple the performance (using Raid level 0) for...lets say $200 more And you'll have 36G of space.

Sure the overall cost is more but the initial difference of $100 or so is worth it. Its inexpensive really, considering you're getting Raid performance out of IDE drives. Makes me wonder why motherboard manufacturers don't include this feature onto their boards. Shouldn't raise the final cost to us by much...

[Stan]

Yep, I do agree with B.E.

I have been running a RAID0 array on a FastTrack RAID controller with 2 IBM 22Gxp 9.1Gb. This is very very fast... can't wait to add another 2 HDs....

Stan

[This message has been edited by Stan (edited 11-02-1999).]