Best Hard drive set up

[Hoppster]

I have two - almost identical hard drives and two cd-rom drives

Hard drives are EIDE Western digital caviar 200gb
One is an 8mb cache WDC2000JB (special edition)
the other is a 2mb cache WDDC2000BB

Question
What is the best set up
a) Have both hdd drives on onecable and both dvd rws on one cable
b) Have the hdds on a separate ide cable each, with the dvds set as slaves.

It would be very awkward to set up option b as the HDD Bays are far from the DVD bays
Ive currently (a) set up, with no problems. The 8mb cache special edition benchmarks slightly slower than the 2mb one (87mb/s vs 91)

Would a raid set up be good, as ive heaps of storage.
Can I use a software Raid, or do I need an adaptor.
(the mobo does not have onboard raid, i dont think)

On the mobo, the first ide socket is Blue, the other is white. What does this mean?

Its a K8T800 mobo, made by NEC (Packard bell)

Or is raid not worth bothering about?

Any guidance would be appreciated.

[GrahamGarside]

you can use software raid in windows xp pro, you need to setup the partitions as dynamic volumes instead of basic. A quick search through the help section of computer management (right click my computer and select mange) should shed some light on it.

As for the ide channel setup, well I recomend hd's on one channel, optical on another. Even though UDMA can't cope with full duplex, you can still get good performance from drive to drive operations, I still get 45-50mb/s from file copys between drives, and I can still copy a cd->cd no problem

[MONKEYMAN]

Setting up a raid 0 array doesnt make a huge difference but it is noticable, the fact that the two cache sizes are different doesnt really matter(ive done it before), If you do this then you will either use the onboard eide raid(depends on your board) or a pci raid card which is in my opinion better as you dont have two hdd's sharing one eide channel which does make for a performance hit.

[GrahamGarside]

With it being a packard bell it likely doesn't have IDE RAID, and it may not even have SATA ports but if it does these will probably support RAID

[MONKEYMAN]

he would gave to buy converters then, no point a pci raid card is less than a tenner.

[vspl]

I just finished setting up my system with a RAID0 configuration. I have two hdd's on different IDE channels both set as primary and also one CDRW and DVDRW both set as slaves on the two IDE channels. Its the first time I've used RAID0 and it seems to work okay.

btw my mobo came with an onboard RAID controller and I used the guide from the front page: "Installing XP using NVRaid", which worked flawlessly, thanks aidan!

[robbie]

Originally Posted by vspl

I just finished setting up my system with a RAID0 configuration. I have two hdd's on different IDE channels both set as primary and also one CDRW and DVDRW both set as slaves on the two IDE channels. Its the first time I've used RAID0 and it seems to work okay.

btw my mobo came with an onboard RAID controller and I used the guide from the front page: "Installing XP using NVRaid", which worked flawlessly, thanks aidan!

I'm really glad that helped you out. It's help me out as well.
Now go tell a friend!!!
Rob