<p>I need help from all you techno-folks out there regarding hard disks for PCs.</p>
<p>I am upgrading. What advantage would I get by installing a RAID controller adapter (PCI) to handle a dual hard disk setup? Would a RAID adapater [EIDE/PATA] always provide faster perfomance than my existing on-board HDD controller?</p>
<p>Thanks.</p>
<p>Are you using the dual drives as a mirrored set - i.e. where everything written to one is written to the other one for fault tolerance, or are you using them to stripe the data to for faster performance (but no fault tolerance)?</p>
<p>This is all new to me. I’ve just begun reading about “stripe the data.” My intent [hope] is to run the OS on one hard disk, and store my applications on the second hard disk. I am hoping for fast performance. But truthfully, I’m not engaged in any highly advanced work on the computer. So maybe an adjustment in speed won’t make much of a difference. I’m using a P4, 2.60 Mhz desktop now.</p>
<p>If you’re looking for performance then a number of factors come into play such as the rotational speed of the drive (i.e. 5400 rpm, 7200 rpm, 10K rpm, 15K rpm), the amount of drive controller cache, the interface being used (SATA, EIDE, etc.), and the ability of the IO controller to handle it. You can sometimes gain from a separate Raid controller that has more cache on it and perhaps a faster bus and sometimes supports Raid levels the built-in disk controller might not support. If you don’t need the extra drive for fault tolerance, i.e. as protection if one of your drives fails, then you can probably set them up as Raid 0 where the data is striped (i.e. split up and written to each of them but not redundantly) for some performance improvement.</p>
<p>If it was me and was planning to use it for home type stuff and not a disk IO intensive situation (large databases, etc.), I wouldn’t worry about it so much, would set the two drives up as a mirror, and feel comfortable it can easily tolerate one of the drives failing. If you do this though, make sure you still backup your important data somewhere other than on that computer since it can always be stolen.</p>
<p>ucsd dad, I don’t mean to hijack this thread, but I have a quick computer question. I noticed in my download folder there are files going back a long time. IF I have saved a download in another folder, can I erase the original download from the download folder??</p>
<p>^^ Yes - as long as you have it saved elsewhere you can delete it from folders where you don’t need it. I assume you downloaded the file, it went to the ‘download’ folder by default, and then you copied it to another folder where you wanted it to be? Next time you can do your download and then ‘move’ it to where you want it instead of ‘copy’ it and then you’ll only have the one copy you want. Alternatively you can override the default download location it prompts to save to ‘if’ it prompts and gives you the option.</p>
<p>Thanks ucsd<em>ucla</em>dad.</p>
<p>I think I’ll stick with using the on-board EIDE controller for a dual drive setup.</p>