First timer and multiple HDs

[awahlster]

Evening, I'm in the process of deciding what hardware to buy for my first computer project. The goal is to build a computer strictly for the storeage and processing of photos. NOTHING ELSE. I have a nice set for the net etc.

What I need help with is the interaction between Mother board and drives.

Basically I need to know what type of mother board to by to be able to have three HDs in my set

the first one would be for the OS and editing programs and two larger drives that would act as filing cabinets with each file stored going to both HD's

I will be using Picture Window Pro as my main editiing program. So the scratch disk idea that is used with Photoshop is not applicable here.

The local PC Club guys said I need a RAID of course without explaining what that is or how it works into the hardware I would be buying.

SO have I given enough info for anyone here to offer help?

ANY knowledgable help will be most appreciated.

[Cricket]

Basically, any current motherboard can support 4 IDE hard drives at the cost of having no optical drives in the system.

If you use SATA hard drives, you can have 2 SATA hard drives and 4 more IDE hard drives installed in the same system. Most current motherboard now support SATA drives.

And you can even add more hard drives by using a PCI IDE controller card which would allow you to add 4 more hard drives per card.

Were you thinking of a AMD or Intel based system...or does it even matter?

:) Cricket

[awahlster]

Cricket, Thanks for the quick reply. I was planning a Pent IV based system.

What I have so far (although nothing has been purchased as yet)

RAIDMAX Black 10-bay Case, Model "268WBP"

Fortron 350W HiQ Brand P4/AMD Ready Power Supply, Model "ATX350GU" -OEM

Intel Pentium 4/ 2.8C GHz 800MHz FSB, 512K Cache, Hyper Threading Technology

I'm still trying to decide on which mother board and of course what drives to install.

I will need a CD RW drive as well as a DVD RW drive

The Mother board will have to support USB-2 Firewire and SCSI for my film scanner.

I'm currently thinking about two 120Gb IDe type drives with 7200rpm and 8Mb cache's

For the OS drive something in a 20-30Gb would be way more then needed and would allow a partioned scratch disk if needed.

Do I need anything to be able to save to two storeage drives in a single action or will I have to do two seperate saves to do the backup?

[Cricket]

I can't help you with your last question (it does sound as if a RAID setup is what you're looking for) but it sounds like you need a motherboard like the ASUS P4C800 Deluxe (http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=13-131-449&depa=0).

:) Cricket

[glc]

Question - you want 2 drives for storage - do you want redundant storage, or do you want a single volume with the capacity of both drives? Redundant storage is "mirroring" - which is RAID 1. It will write files to both drives simultaneously and is the best for data protection. Two 160gb drives will give you 160gb of capacity this way, appearing as a single volume. Single volume is either RAID 0 or JBOD, that way a pair of 160gb drives gives you 320gb of capacity as a single volume, but if one drive craps out, you lose both. RAID 0 will give you a nice speed increase too.

Either way, I'd recommend the Asus that Cricket linked to, along with SATA drives instead of IDE. That board has four SATA connectors on 2 separate controllers - the Intel ICH5R and a Promise. Both controllers are RAID-capable with the Intel being marginally faster. I'd put a single 80gb SATA on the Promise as your OS drive, all by itself, controller configured as a standalone without RAID - and install Windows. Then I'd put a pair on the ICH5R in RAID after the fact.

I believe it can be configured this way - if anyone actually has this board and can confirm, it would be appreciated.