KT7 or KT7 Raid - Please Help

[RichDem]

After posting a previous message I have decided to buy an Abit KT7 mainboard for my new Duron system, can anyone tell me if the only difference between the KT7 & KT7 Raid is the support for ATA 100 drives. Would there be any performance gains using the KT7 Raid board with normal 7200RPM drives?

Also is it worth spending the extra cash on the raid board if I am not going to use the support for the new drives.

Any advice would be much appreciated

Richard Carter

[OPPAINTER]

The only differance is the raid array and ata 100, which neither can be used with just the KT7. I can't compare performance with just haveing one hd set up at 66 ata.Ive always had mine setup useing 2 HDs at Raid 0. I can tell you the benchmarks are way higher, Twice as fast. All I can tell you is my system is very Fast. Theres one thing, even if you dont use the Raid Array, you will always have more room to add IDE devices. The price is what $30 differents. Get the Raid Mobo. Heres a link for more stuff on Raid. http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/perf/raid/index.htm
http://www.apushardware.com/?action=articles&id=22
http://www.ocworkbench.com/hardware/abit/kt7raid/kt7raidp1.htm

Abit KT7 Raid T-bird 950@1210,110x11, 2xIBM 75GXP 15g @ raid-0, Uz103b1a Bios, 2.07v,~15cto~45c,ALPHA PAL-6035
2x 128 Mushkin REV2
ELSA GeFORCE-2 GTS
Win98/2

[otheos]

If you're on a budget get the KT7 non RAID. The performance difference between ATA100 and ATA66 (non raid) is non existent and it will stay like this untill you upgrade to a new mobo (hard drive sustained rates will not exceed 50MB/s for at least a year or more). After all if you find yourself regreting that you didn't buy the raid version, or if you suddenly want to raid, or you need more than 4 IDE devices the controller on a card by Abit is about $35 to add later, or you may chose SCSI for your CD-Roms and a controler for $20 (much wiser choice for CD related hardware).