IDE raid

[mb26]

i am thinking of getting a IDE raid PCI card, and getting some speed out of a couple of old hard drives..

Does it matter they are totally different? i have one which is 4GB and one which is 6GB, both are 5400rpm. Does using raid literally double the speed? as i understand it putting them in raid0 would give me one, 8GB, 10.8k-rpm drive.

is there any way i could use the other 2GB, as a separate partition, or with its own O/S?
no big loss if not i guess.

also, if something were to go wrong so that windows didn't load up.. would i just have to set another drive as master, and then load the drivers then it would show up as a drive?

Does it use more power having a controller card than using hard drives though the motherboard? presumably it uses a higher peak of power (same power in a shorter time) using raid0 as normally with 2 hard drives they wouldn't both be written to at once alot?

also could i attach a third, 120GB, drive and setup Raid0+1, but use the other 112GB remaining aswell? or do you need to use four drives do do raid0+1?

[glc]

Does it matter they are totally different? Yes

Does using raid literally double the speed? No

putting them in raid0 would give me one, 8GB, 10.8k-rpm drive. Nope, you have 2 old 5400 rpm mismatched drives.

is there any way i could use the other 2GB, as a separate partition, or with its own O/S? No.

also could i attach a third, 120GB, drive and setup Raid0+1, but use the other 112GB remaining aswell? No.

do you need to use four drives do do raid0+1? Yep.

[mb26]

lol great.. so do they have to be exactly the same drive? or what needs to be the same.
there is no reason it wont work with 2 old matched 5400rpm drives is there?
and what sort of performance increase do you get?

[glc]

It's highly recommended that they be matched drives, anything else will invite instability and IDE RAID 0 is not particularly stable to begin with. Performance increase will probably be in the area of 20% or so.

[mb26]

ok sounds like i'd be better off with one 7200rpm drive than raid-ing the old ones then.. does sata raid give better performance increases? and is it more stable?

[glc]

Raid 0 of any type is only stable with matched drives - all the timings, etc. need to be identical to minimize the possibility of data corruption.