Native IDE vs Raid

[Dharmesh Arora]

I'm running Windows Xp as my operating system. I am looking into using a RAID 1 configuration with 2 SATA hard disks at 3.0gps. I've been using native IDE. My motherboard has the AMD 790FX NB and 600 SB chipsets. How much of a performance increase, as well as any other advantages, would I have with the RAID 1 compared to the Native IDE? Can any body tell me the actual differences native ide and raid? Does any body knows about it? Kindly provide me the correct information on the above issue.

[T.J.]

Since your motherboard has the Silicon Image SATA/RAID ports, any connected drives are limited by the PCI bus, so will perform similarly to an IDE hard drive(s). ATI SB600 SATA controller supports 4 modes: Legacy IDE, Native IDE, AHCI and RAID. Legacy/Native IDE mode is designed for compatibility with some old OS without AHCI driver but looses SATAII/AHCI features such as NCQ.

[Rawko]

If you want RAID-0 you need 2 Hard drives partitioned for RAID, you will need the RAID drivers as well and a floppy drive the drivers can be loaded to a floppy. The system stability is not effected by a RAID configuration. You also will need to set your SATA controller to RAID in Bios. When using RAID, the read/write speed is substantially improved over a single drive. In theory the read/write speed is twice the single drive.You will not be able to run RAID and a SATA DVD drive or SATA cd drive on the same controller they are SATA/native IDE You also wont be able to use any SATA/Native IDE or IDE/PATA Hard drives on that controller.

[deoWo]

RAID is available for your motherboard in 2 flavors: RAID0 (striping) or RAID1 (mirroring). You know RAID1 hardly comes with any performance benefit, and in fact on driver RAID will just behave as a single disk. Writes may even be a little slower. So you are not comparing RAID against PATA; you are comparing your SATA drive against your PATA drive. Both PATA and SATA are IDE, by the way. I would advise against RAID1, because its better to make a backup, either manually or automated synchronisation. This protects against more dangers and relieves you of using RAID drivers which may not work flawlessly on Windows.