Running winxp pro and a a8n-sli mobo, can i raid together 2 80gb hdd, 1 sata 1 ide?

is this possible? ive heard both answers and so am asking y'all for the Truth!

In my experience the drives have to be identical and on the same controller.

I think it may depend on whether you use hardware or software based raid. I only use hardware, and I have both a SATA and IDE raid array. I can't combine them together though...the two SATA can only be put into an array together.

I'd imagine software-based raid wouldn't care how the hard drive is connected, but I don't have any personal experience with that.

identical in what way? manufacturer, interface, capacity, rpm?

If you CAN run them in raid (which I severly doubt) the performance you gain from if you just used two SATA drives will be impaired.

When you setup a raid array it's always best to use identical drives, it's NEVER twice as fast, I think even the best raid setups yield about 80% better performance, if you did your setup you'd notice 30% improvement tops, possibly more hangs as the slower drive tries to catch up.

It'd be better to run all your antivirus and other less demanding software (mp3's, antivirus) on the IDE drive, and just install your performance hungry software (games / photoshop) on the primary drive - by being smart you can even outperform that potential raid setup.

All this discussion on RAID and no one mentions what type of RAID.

There are many type of RAID configuration, non of them provide a performance increase except RAID 0.

They all provide redundancy, except RAID 0. Afterall that is what RAID is about, Redundancy, not perfomance increases.

Stuart

Performance tests of raid and 'games' by some people (one was Maximum PC) showed that raid 0 did not improve performance.

Regardless of the RAID level or any differences in drive capacity it's the RAID controller that creates the array. i.e. The Asus A8V deluxe has two onboard RAID contollers. A Promise FastTrak378 that handles SATA RAID and IDE RAID is handled by an integrated controller in the VIA VT8237 southbridge chipset. Both are enabled/disabled in the bios and both have different setup menus. I don't know it your 'a8n-sli mobo' is RAID ready or if you plan to use those controllers. I have yet to see an independent RAID contoller that allows both SATA and IDE in the same array. Even if you were to find one I don't think the price plus the limited improvement in perfomance (RAID 0) or security (RAID 1) would be worth it. I would consider ponying up the $$$ for another identical HDD, preferably to match your SATA drive. Then your only limitation would be that of the controller you're using in setting up any level of RAID array.

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