Sata, Raid, Harddrive questions.

[Sune]

Please could you explaine this to me like im 5 years old because i've been searching for info on the net and not getting any closer to any answers.

1. I have a mobo Asus A7N8X Deluxe and i dont have any Sata drives, i have dissabled the sata raid function on the mobo, will this also disable the IDE Raid function?

2. What is IDE Raid?

3. How can, and should i run my hdd:s as raid?

4. I have 2 hdd:s, 1 CD player and 1 CD writer. Should i connect the hdd:s as master and slave on the same cable or should i combine hdd1 master, cd player slave, CD writer master hdd2 slave. What works out best and give the best performance?

b t w, the hdd:s that i have are one 120GB Maxtor 8MB cache and one IBM GXP180 80GB 2MB cache.

Im running Windows XP Pro, Amd XP 2800+ Barton, 1 Gb ddr PC3200, ATI 9500 Pro 128 mb, Antec 430w PSU.

Thnaks

[Force Flow]

1) As long as it is IDE RAID and not SATA RAID, then it will not be disabled.

2) RAID can be used for mirroring or stripping drives, or a combination of both. Check this out: http://www.pcmech.com/show/harddrive/296/

3) You can run 2 drives per IDE RAID controller. As stated in the artice, depending on what you want to do, you can utilize 2-4 drives.

4) Which drive contains the O/S?

[edit]: Okay, I took a look a the board's specs and in answer to your first question, it looks like only the SATA controllers are RAID, while the IDE controllers are just your standard IDE controllers.