Drive array suggestions please

I ordered a new SATA drive without giving much thought on how to arrange & partition it, except that it'll somehow compliment my existing drive. I'd like to leave the original SATA drive as the root OS drive and use the new drive as scratch disk for PS and media storage, if for no other reason than to save reinstalling everything (4 years worth of crap). The new drive arrived today and if someone, anyone could offer advice on the best way to set it up I'd appreciate it. Something hugging the margins of safety and performance would be great :) ......I'd settle for a point in the right direction- couldn't come up with the right keywords in several search attempts.

Incidentally, this is for XP, 2GB ram, the original drive is 80GB and the new one is 250GB. The motherboard has two different chipsets for raid, the Promise 20378 and the ICH5/ICH5R, as it stand the original drive is in the first ICH5 slot. Thanks!

I think the best you can do is plug it into the other controller.

drive arrays (raid0) are installed as pairs of (usually) equally sized drives. And if you want to stripe your 80 and 250, you'll have to erase the 80, if it's even possible (I remember some hardware raid set ups let you use different sized drives, but total capacity is limited to the smaller times two).

Thanks, I'd forgotten about this. Would ordering a second 250 to mirror or stripe be a good plan? Would there be a safe way to dump the old 80 onto one of the new drives? Sorry for all the ignorance! Or would I get acceptable performance in using the secondary drive on a separate controller (which sounds easy and therefor perfect)? Thanks for the help.

Too complicated.

I got a 4 harddrive (500gb each) SATA RAID drive array for my Macintosh.

Plugged the PCI card into the PCI slot on the mother-board, plugged in the array, turned everything on, and I was working.

Nothing else to do but make pictures. I don't get Windows. Sorry, I'm just ignorant.

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Originally Posted by Colin Graham

Thanks, I'd forgotten about this. Would ordering a second 250 to mirror or stripe be a good plan? Would there be a safe way to dump the old 80 onto one of the new drives? Sorry for all the ignorance! Or would I get acceptable performance in using the secondary drive on a separate controller (which sounds easy and therefor perfect)? Thanks for the help.

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what is acceptable to one is not acceptable to another. Plug your drive in, if you're getting frustrated, time to buy more gear.

keep in mind this is from someone with 4 x 10k drive raid0 array to use on his web surfing/email machine. haha

The hardware isn't complicated, it's the hardware+CS3+huge files that I'm a little soft on. The digital workstation concept is pretty new to me. I'm mainly interested in short term storage for media files (while I'm still working on them, I store long term on removable media) and a decent sized scratch disk for CS3. Doesn't need to be cutting edge or anything; is there a good way to partition the second drive, or should I leave the volume whole, am I going to be fingerpainting while the two drives communicate, that sort of thing. I had thought about doing a partition on the new drive just for a scratch disk and using the rest for storage, but Im not sure if that's the best way. Thanks for the help.

Idealy, you would want all of the following on different drives:

system
working/storage (I actually use two different drives for this.)
scratch
paging

Of course, it can get as complicated as you want with various RAID setups and whatnot, but I definitely would NOT use the new drive for both scratch and working/storage. You'll run into a bottleneck as the drive wants to read and write at the same time, thus slowing you down.

So, at this point, I suggest you use the new drive for your working/storage volume and purchase another smaller drive for a scratch disc...40GB should be fine. This would mean that there's no need to partition the drive in any other way but one.

Thanks Mike, great point. Man, I had all of this down 4 years ago when I built this thing but cant remember any of it...The more I re-delve into it, the more I think I may order 3 more of these 250 drives and get rid of the 80. Some of the arrays people have are staggering to me. I'm mainly just trying to eek another year out of this computer before I have to get another one, and trying not to dump too much money into it. Thanks for the suggestion.

For about $300 I put together my toaster: a Netgear hard drive network storage solution with a pair of 300 gig drives; left toast and right toast. I could have mirrored the drives but I didn't. The toaster connects to a wireless DSL and my laptops connect via wireless. It's slick and cheap.