SATA with IDE HD for vid editing posible?

[stump]

Hello All,

I am considering purchasing the following HD: Maxtor 250GB 7200RPM SATA Hard Drive and adding it to my computer. I currently have two Maxtor 7500 RPM, 80Gig IDE HD’s installed in the machine. I have a few questions.

I have a P4P800 mobo, running Winxp. I do a lot of video editing.

1. Can this SATA drive be run along with with the other two IDE drives?

2. Can the two Maxtor’s be connected using RAID, so I can do vid editing & rendering on the RAID drive & have the OS & vid storage on the SATA 250MB drive?

3. Is there a completely different HD configuration that might give me better performance, without going SCSI & paying big bucks? (but don't rule out SCSI completely!)

4. is there an advantage of running SATA instead of IDE?

5. would there be a possible power supply issue by running 3 HD's? (I believe I have a 350W, brand unknown, it came with my case so it could be a cheapie. I'm not by my machine right now)

All of your input is greatly appreciated

[glc]

1. Yes.
2. Yes.
3. SATA RAID with WD Raptors. Blindingly fast.
4. Yes. SATA is a tad faster and hits the CPU a little easier. The cabling takes up a lot less space in the case too.
5. Only if your 350 is substandard. I'm running 3 hard drives and a bunch of stuff off a quality 300w with no power issues.

[stump]

Thanks, GLC for the info. Before I order my HD, I’ll like to ask an opinion.

I've had great luck with Maxtor, though I've read some negative reviews regarding their 250g HD. What is the most reliable HD? I see that Maxtor, Hitachi, WD & others make 250 Gig HD's as well. Anyone have a recommendation?

[RJ]

Go Western Digital then. They're known to be reliable, too.

And stay away from Hitachi, their "Deskstar" should be called "Deathstar" (Not the same like the one in Star Wars, though. . well maybe it does blow up too if you fire a proton torpedo into the exhaust hole ) because of their unreliability.

RJ

[stump]

Okay, I've got the 250MB SATA drive in, the two 80gig hd's connected, one to the primary RAID, one to the secondary RAID IDE slot. Both drives are jumpered to "master".

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought that with RAID 0, two 80gig HD's would show up as one 80gig drive in windows. On my computer it shows up as one 160g drive. When I set it up in the BIOS both drives were listed as RAID 0, one drive was stripe 0 and the other stripe 1.

Does this sound right? Did I miss something?

[glc]

Raid 0 is a stripe set, it will show as a single volume with the capacity of both drives. Raid 1 is a mirror set, it will show as a single volume with the capacity of one drive.

[stump]

Great, I did it right! Now that I think about it, it makes sense that the volume would have the combined capacity of the two drives. Half the data goes on one drive, half on the other. Now I know.

I benchmarked the raid drive, and it is almost twice as fast. I also have twice the storage that I had originally thought I would have... That kicks arse!

Thanks glc & RJ for your input.