Advice on RAID Setup

[grom]

I just got myself a ASUS P5QC motherboard with 2 x SeaGate 400 gig 7200rpm SATA-2 NCQ drives and want to setup RAID. But I am confused by the fact the motherboard offers 3 different controllers for this:

• Intel® ICH10R Southbridge

• Marvell 88SE6111 controller

• Silicon Image SIL5723 controller

Which one has the best performance?

On a side note I don't have a floppy drive. So if need install of drivers doing installation I gonna have to slipstream them into my XP SP3 disk.

Also I understand these controllers are software RAID. So how would RAID 0 setup with this onboard controllers compare to RAID 0 setup using the built-in software raid in XP?

And for read performance are RAID 0 and RAID 1 pretty similar. I'm trying to decide if I should go RAID 0 and use my 2 existing 180Gb PATA Drives for backup. Or use RAID 1 and use my existing PATA Drives for archival (large files that would not be the end of the world if I lost them).

[DMB2000uk]

Go with the Intel ICH10R, it's the main SATA and RAID controller on the PC.

I don't know specific figures, but I would have thought it would have been better than the in windows RAID setup (in windows RAID wont let you run your OS on it for one).

Speed vs Reliability, the choice is yours. I've chosen speed in my rig and haven't had problems with drives failing yet. I have an external 500GB drive that I keep important things backed up onto though.

Dan

[hnzw_rui]

Also I understand these controllers are software RAID. So how would RAID 0 setup with this onboard controllers compare to RAID 0 setup using the built-in software raid in XP?

And for read performance are RAID 0 and RAID 1 pretty similar. I'm trying to decide if I should go RAID 0 and use my 2 existing 180Gb PATA Drives for backup. Or use RAID 1 and use my existing PATA Drives for archival (large files that would not be the end of the world if I lost them).

Using the built-in controllers for RAID set-up should be faster than the Windows implementation. From some of the comments I've read, the RAID implementation on Windows is a joke.

I think you've confused RAID 0 and RAID 1. RAID 0 is striping. It divides your data into two pieces and puts them on both hard drives which make for fast read and writes. The disadvantage to it this if you lose one drive, then you've lost all your data. RAID 1 is mirroring. It creates a copy of your data on both hard drives. Note that RAID 1 is not a backup solution. While RAID 0 is all about performance, RAID 1 is about uptime. If one of the hard drives in a RAID 1 array fail, your computer can still run from the other hard drive. RAID 1 is still susceptible to the usual causes of data loss - viruses and human error (I've hit shift+del way too many times )

[grom]

RAID 1 is still susceptible to the usual causes of data loss - viruses and human error (I've hit shift+del way too many times )

Yeah I'm aware of that. I just want to protect from hardware failure.