>  Seagate 160g 7200 rpm sata HD.

>  The HD I'm looking at as the add-on is a WD Raptor 10,000 rpm sata.
>  question

The first question is, are you asking about a hardware RAID, or a software
RAID? If this is  on-board hardware RAID, you want to read your motherboard
manual as to how best to set things up. However, in general, in a RAID 0
performance setup, the closer the drives match the better, because you want
to be reading and writing data to the two drives simultaneously, and
matching drives supply a better balance. The most important issue, in
either hardware and software, is to keep all the drives that are in the
RAID, on different channels, and if possible, different controllers. You
don't want the read/writes to be coming down the same cable.

But this does not preclude you from using different size and speed drives,
or even sharing a channel on a controller. However, when you set up two
drives in a RAID configuration, the entire drives become a dynamic volume,
and only matching sized partitions will be part of the RAID 0 setup.

For example, you have two drives ... your 160 GB Seagate and a new 74 GB
Raptor. You want to set up a RAID 0 for performance with the two drives. In
order to boot from these drives, it will have to be a Hardware RAID setup
that supports such a configuration. Software RAID will not allow you to
boot from a dynamic volume. So let's say you have a third drive you wish to
boot from, which is safer and smarter. At the very least in a RAID 0 you
want your data on a normal drive. Let's say you have a third Raptor. This
is partitioned as a single NTFS Primary Active partition. Your operating
system is here, and your data is here.

Now you want to RAID 0 your 160 GB Seagate with another 74 GB Raptor. A
single 74X 2 = 148 GB RAID 0 partition will be created but the rest of the
Seagate will be in a remaining partition  that is <within the dynamic
volume>.  It can be either a logical or a primary partition but it is all
in the dynamic volume.

What does this mean. Something happens to one drive it wipes out all data.
Your Raptor dies ...you don't loose 74GB of data, you loose 74 + 160 GB of
data. You also will not be able to use things like Partition Magic, Drive
Image or Ghost with the dynamic volume.


>  1) Will the two different speed drives be compatible?
>               2) Do both drives have to be sata or can one be IDE (crazy
>question I guess but I'm just curious)

they can be different = a IDE and a SATA in a software RAID, and  a
hardware RAID. but with a hardware RAID you will need to check to see if
your controller supports this. Some do and some don't.

>               3) If drives are compatible, should I put system files (XP
>home) or program files (audio/video processing programs and some games) on the
>faster drive (I'm assuming the video files themselves need to be on the larger
>capacity drive)?

I would put system files and data on a non RAID drive. I have two
workstations, both have RAID 0 setups. One is two matching WD 60 GB drives
in a onboard hardware RAID 0 setup which is used only for video capture,
editing, virtual drives and systems, as well as temp files. The second
computer has on-board hardware RAID however it doesn't support two PATA
drives so.  I am using it in a software RAID 0 for a capture partition. Two
PATA DiaomandMax drives ... a 40GB and a 30GB drive. So I have a single 60
GB RAID 0 partition and a separate non RAID 10 GB partition BUT both
partitions are part of the dynamic volume.


>               4) Would I be better off with raid-0 or raid-1
>   and lastly)

depends whether or not you are looking for performance or redundancy.
RAID-0 equals performance without protection. RAID-1 equals redundancy
without as good as performance. Redundancy means you will loose hard drive
space as you are mirroring your drive.

>Need I be concerned about extra cooling for the faster drive?

I am running a 10K 74GB Raptor. I don't think it runs any hotter then the
72K RPM WD 8meg cache drive. You do want to make sure it has adequate
ventilation, but I don't think it is necessary to do anything special. Keep
in mind, that for the moment, the Raptor is a Enterprise drive that is set
up for servers, not Desktops. You will not see as big a performance
increase over the WD 8meg cache 72K drive as you might imagine. This has to
do with better platter density on the 72K drive as opposed to better and
longer lasting components on the Enterprise drive, which has a 5 year warranty.


Rode
The NOSPIN Group
http://freepctech.com

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