RAID or Not

[mrmax]

I will be putting together a Athlon system. The motherboards I'm considering are:
Abit KG7-Lite $121 pricewatch
Abit KG7-RAID $157 best i can tell pricewatch
or
Gigabyte GA-7DX $89
Gigabyte GA-7DXR Raid $123

If you can suggest a better MB/no RAID your opinion is welcome.

I am a home/office user. The kids and I play online games at a serious level.

Is there any reason to get a RAID motherboard. This system has no future plans to be a network server.

I am interested a faster file system. Is there a raid setup that would take a stand ide hard drive, and deliver faster hard drive performance?

[Philip1952]

With a raid board you have a choice if you want to use more than four ide devices. With out you are limited to four unless you buy an add in card for them. I recommend a raid board my self for this reason. Even if you don't plan on useing it.
Most of the raid boards out are for use of a ide drive. You just need to have two drives of the same make and model. You will see faster acess to and loading programs. But you are still limited to your cpu speed after they are loaded. Raid won't make a game faster. Just the loading ot it or anything needing info from the hard drive. So the big question is do you want a program to load in maby 5 to 8 second. Or in 2 to 3 seconds. That is where you see the biggest difference with raid. Unless you are doing a lot of vedio editing or some thing that will need to do a lot of large file movements.
The other thing is with built in raid. If you enable and use it. Your boot time will be longer than with out it. I had a Abit BE6-2 with raid. Before I used it load time was 45 seconds. With raid installed it took 1.5 minutes.

[This message has been edited by Philip1952 (edited 08-29-2001).]

[rheteric]

In response to your longer boot up time, does this hold true for all RAID controllers? Will boot up time be doubled regardless?

[Philip1952]

I'm not sure of the pci card raid controllers. But from what I have read on other BBS's. Most tend to increace the boot time. I am not sure of how much. I have only used the built in raid config before.

[Kuasimodem]

My computer sits on the RAID bios screen (detecting drives) for about 8-10 seconds, I hardly notice the difference in boot times compared to my Classic Athlon system, or my Winchip system.

[surrealchereal]

But if you want or need the RAID set up what does boot time matter?

[Comage]

You should get the RAID even if you have no use for it. An extra 2 IDE controllers isn't really a bad idea. I'm stuck with my non-RAID board (A7V133-C), and I had to chain my writer to my CD-ROM drive. Dang. :(